Friday, March 1, 2013

Jetlagged baby, jetlagged mom

A question I often get, both by random people who ask where we have traveled from and people who are planning to travel with their child, is how I deal with Zoe's jet lag. And this is often the phrasing of it: How do you deal with her having jet lag. While I don't disagree much with any of the advice given over at "Have baby, will travel", one of the obvious answers is that you deal with it like you deal with your own. Traveling west, you both wake up 3:40am the first night, 4:30am the next and after three nights you have a fairly normal day. On the way east you get a more extreme sleep pattern, waking up every four or so hours for a couple of days. That said, my best piece of advice is the advice they give to new mothers: Baby sleep, parent sleep. Don't think that you will wake up at 2 am but the child won't. Go to sleep as soon as the child have nudged off, that being 6pm or 11pm. So the question is not how I deal with Zoe's jet lag but how we deal with our jet lag.

And, yes, it is currently 4 am the day after Zoe and I got back to Stockholm and we have been awake both since 2:30 am. Zoe is watching "In the night garden", the most calm children's show I can think of and I hope we can go back to sleep in not too long.

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