Jet lag with child


As I expected, children and jet lag don’t go very well together.
Butterball Destroyer was fine (she doesn’t care what timezone she’s in, she just has a constant unvarying cycle of feeding, sleeping and excreting) but La Serpiente was a major problem. She slept for most of the flight back, but that meant she didn’t go to sleep until past 10pm last night, and then at 1 in the morning she had finished what for her consituted napping, and was ready for action.

And what actionns…

There was the traiditonal shout-at-one-parent-that-you-only-want-the-other-parent, repeated ad infinitum to both mother and father. There was the horror film whispering as she writed on our bed. There was the particularly ingenious way she took off her nappy at two in the morning, then soaked her sleep bag and her bed with uring, and then complained that we didn’t have dry clothes on hand for her.

There was the point (about 3am, I think) where she was adamant that she was going to wait for the sun to come up.

Every time one of us was on the verge of getting her to sleep, another 45 minutes had passed, which meant it was time for Destroyer to wake up and start bawling at us. Which in turn disturbed La Serpiente and got her back to fully awake.

Frustrated, enraged, there I was at four in the morning biting my cheek and trying to explain to her that she couldn’t play with the potty. Not my finest hour.

In the end, I took Destroyer out for a long walk, throughout which she stared at me with unblinking eyes, contemptuous of my attempts to pacify her, and at around 6 I got back, gave her back to her mother, read two more books to La Serpiente and had her fall asleep with her head in my armpit. On the positive side, all this walking around has made it easy to complete the step goal on my Fitbit today.

My wife bore the brunt of it though: she slept until 9:30, and La Serpiente didn’t wake until 11 (by which piint I’d been away at work for two hours). There was no nap this afternoon, no respite until I came back in the late afternoon to handle childminding duties. At least La Serpiente went down without complaint tonight, in less than ten minutes.

Although she woke up again ten minutes ago, disturbed by a video conference. That’s not exactly work life balance, is it now?

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