Wednesday, September 03, 2008

How to Make Jetlag Work for You!

Belgium is 6 hours ahead of New York. While we were away, we stayed with RaggedyDad's sister and her family in their home. They've got 2 daughters, aged 5 and nearly 2.

Summer schedule in their household means that bedtime is on the late side. Here, I usually get everyone to sleep between 6:30 and 7 p.m., though Little Rag wakes up at least twice over the course of the night. Bedtime in Belgium, between the sun going down late and the kids being busy with extended family, ran more about 9:30 or 10 p.m. The kids woke up later, too.

Rather than make some kind of doomed-to-fail attempt to recreate their home schedule, we only encouraged the kids in their gleeful staying up late and the sometimes inevitable later morning sleeping that followed.

This all meant that when we came home, it was just a couple of days of making the effort for them to stay awake until 5:30 or 6 p.m., since that was just a couple of hours 'later' for them in Belgian time. The gist of it all is that we're back for 3 days and are doing fairly well with their sleep.

The one caveat is that by 5 a.m. or so, everyone's up. But when I consider that from the perspective of the mature adult I pretend to be on some days, I realize that this is actually beneficial. Ann's got a much earlier morning from now on due to the BGST ("Big-Girl-School" Transition), so early mornings will be busy and productive around here. Wish us luck! Yawn!!

6 comments:

SaraK said...

I can't wait to hear all about Ann's first day at Big Girl school!

Leah Goodman said...

Nice job. Good to have you back to blogging!

and yeah, what SaraK said. I wanna hear about Ann's first day!

SaraK said...

Well, I'll be hearing it live from Ann on Friday night :)

Jameel @ The Muqata said...

Welcome back!

(Daylight helps reduce jetalg...)

LittleBirdies said...

Welcome back. I'm sure Ann is very excited about going to big girl school.

RaggedyMom said...

Today was just our day to wait at the bus stop and flag down her bus driver. Orientation is on Monday, and school starts on Tuesday!