Family Jet Lag

Dave and I once visited his sister in Vienna. After sitting awake on the airplane all night, we gamely stayed awake all day and laid our heads on our pillows around 8pm that night. Exhausted and sleeping in a dark basement, we both fell sound asleep. And with no clock and no sunlight filtering in, we slept until 4:00 the following afternoon - 8am in our home timezone. We struggled to adjust to Austrian time the rest of the week.

Learning our lessons well, Dave and I have always strive to put ourselves immediately on local time when we travel. However, traveling across 14 hours with young children made this approach impossible. We quickly learned that the way to adjust very young children to jet lag is simply to follow their schedule. When a young child wakes up, wake up with them. When a young child gets sleepy, go to bed with them. The family will have adjusted to local time within 3 days, guaranteed.

It seems we have outgrown this strategy.

We arrived in Chicago the evening before Thanksgiving. We spent Thanksgiving in the midst of a wonderful family gathering, and didn't allow anyone naps. We all fell asleep in the car on the way home that evening, and slept soundly through the night, exhausted. With earlier than average mornings, we had adjusted the local time as quickly as that. We should have followed that example this time, but instead sent everyone to nap yesterday when Sophia got sleepy. We all managed to fall asleep by 3:00 in the afternoon, and could each have kept going well past 5:30 when I woke up.

So, here's the new rule:

For children still napping, and too young to understand that darkness means sleepytime, parents need to follow their lead. As with newborns, sleep when the baby sleeps.

For anyone old enough to push through naptime, place yourself on local time immediately. No naps on that first day back.