nap strike

[aryanhwy]

The difference between 20 months and 24 months when dealing with a 7 hour time change has been quite a bit. When we came over in June/July, Gwen had two mornings where she was up around 4:30 (killer!), a few mornings when she was up around 6:00 (thank you, Grandma, for letting us sleep in!), and then she was basically fine, due to regular naps at regular times and regular bedtimes at night.

We haven't been so lucky. Gwen slept all the way over on the plane on Friday, which was great for Joel, but that plus the two hour drive to my parents' place meant that when she went to bed at 11:00pm that night, she woke up around 3:15 and was ready to go for the day. On Saturday, she did nap some on the ride to Madison (an hour before lunch), and a bit in the ride to Lake Delton (about half an hour mid afternoon), and that is, unfortunately, the last time she has napped -- unless you count when she woke up at 3:15 Sunday morning, and went back to bed for about two hours an hour later, or when she woke up at 2:30 yesterday morning and went back to bed three hours later for about two hours. Somehow we managed to power through yesterday until 6:15pm, which is honestly not all that unusual of a bed time, but still she was up around 4:30, and while she almost fell asleep in the car around 10:30am, we didn't let her because we were about 10 min. from home and really really really wanted to have her nap there.

Unfortunately, it's now 2.5 hours later and I'm fairly certain we've past the sweet spot, and I doubt we'll be able to get her to nap this afternoon.

Argh, argh, argh. What with the almost 12 hour time change for me, I'm feeling the jet lag like I almost never do, and I've been crashing around 7:00pm and going to bed then myself -- which means among other things when Gwen woke up at 4:30, I woke up too, and figured there was no point in presuming upon Mom to take care of her in the middle of the night yet again, so I got up. I'm now horribly tired, but unlikely to get a nap myself. The worst part of it is, I have no patience with Gwen, especially when she gets whiny and shows how much she really, really needs a nap. But I'm simply too tired to deal with her, even now when she's playing happily with a tea set that was mine when I was a kid, even when she's digging through the stack of library books from our visit yesterday saying "nother book, nother book". Ugh.

On the other hand, the fact that she's poured a bunch of marbles into the tea pot and is offering it to me, "mommy tea", and then running to Joel and offering it to him, "daddy coffee", is pretty cute.

ETA: It's nearly 12 hours since she's woken up, and I think she's finally fallen asleep. And it's still early enough in the afternoon that she could have a decent nap, and be ready for bed at a decent-ish time. Hurrah!

Comments

[smittenbyu]

ugghh jet lag! I feel your exhaustion! After 3 international travels within a year, I told my hubby I am done for a minimum of a year to go anywhere that has a time change.

It always took us ten days to get back to "normal"!

[aryanhwy.livejournal.com]

The rule of thumb I've heard is one day per hour of time change, which means about a week -- and amazingly that's usually pretty accurate. Unfortunately, when it's a 10 day trip, that means you get 3 days of normality before you do it all over again.