Last Saturday, we left the US to travel across 10 timezones back overseas. This is the second time that we’ve done that with little EC, and the first time the jet-lag transition was awful. It must have taken two weeks to get her back on track. This time, I came up with a strategy to reset her internal clock, which involved slowly moving what she thought of as “nighttime” from the middle of the day to the middle of the night, in few-hour steps each day for a week or so.

It didn’t work well. Apparently I was too aggressive, not giving her enough time to sleep in the early days, and she ended up so exhausted by the third day or so after we got back that she really didn’t want to sleep at all. So then I had to deal not only with the time displacement of jet lag, but an exceedingly unhappy baby too.

Here’s how she slept, starting on the day we landed:

• “Nighttime (Saturday)”: 7:00 am – 2:00 pm (7 hours, woke up on the airplane during landing)
• “First nap”: 8:30 pm – 11:00 pm
• “Second nap”: 5:30 am – 7:30 am (2 hours)
• “Nighttime (Sunday)”: 9:30 am – 2:30 pm (5 hours, woke up by me)
• “First nap”: 5:30 pm – 7:00 pm
• “Second nap”: 8:30 pm – 10:30 pm
• “Nighttime (Monday)”: 01:30…false start…woke at 2:00…kicked around until…4:45 am – 12:15 pm (7.5 hours, woke up by me, turns out she had pooped)
• “First nap”: 1:30 pm – 4:30 pm
• “Second nap”: 5:30 pm…fail after 30 minutes
• “Nighttime (Tuesday)”: 9:30 pm – 10:30 pm … followed by intermittent kicking and screaming until … 12:30 am … I change her diaper, her pooping schedule must be off. More screaming … 1:00 am she throws her security blanket on the floor, I give it back, she does it again, and then the screaming really starts … 2:00 am she falls asleep sans blankie. I replace blankie in the night. Sleeps until 11:15 am (9 hours, woke up by me).
• “First nap”: 1:30 pm – 3:00 pm
• “Second nap”: 4:30 – (failure…she pooped and then cried)
• “Nighttime (Wednesday)”: 7:00 pm – 9:45 pm … poop, cry, clean … kick around until … maybe 12:30? I dozed off … slept until 8:30 am (10.5 hours all together? woke up on her own)
• “First nap”: 10:15 am … didn’t work, just cried and rolled around … got her up, put her back down at 12:30 pm … cried and rolled around until 2:00 pm. Woke at 2:30 pm. That was it.
• “Nighttime (Thursday)”: Down at 6:00 pm. Cried until 7:00 pm. (Her final whimpers before drifting to sleep: “Dada…Mama…Pooh Bear…”). Woke up just before 8:00 pm. I changed her diaper (nothing) and “protected” her against future pooping at 8:15 pm. Fell asleep at 11:30 pm? Slept until 10:00 am. (10 hours maybe, woke up naturally)
• First nap (Friday): 12:00 pm, cried until 12:45 pm. Slept until 1:15 pm.
• Second nap (Friday): Took a drive. Slept in the car from 4:00 pm to 4:30 pm.
• Nighttime (Friday): Down at 9:00 pm. Sat in the room reading until she fell asleep, at 10:00 pm. Not much crying. (I don’t know if this constitutes success or failure.) Woke up at 11:00 pm. Cried, asleep again by 11:30. Awake naturally at 7:00 am.
• First nap (Saturday): Down at 9 am. Sat reading until she slept. Asleep by 10 am. Awake at 10:40 am.
• Second nap (Saturday): 1:40 pm – 2:20 pm.
• Nighttime (Saturday): Down at 8:15 pm. Fell asleep at 10:30 pm. Up at 7:45 am.
• First nap (Sunday): Down at 11:30 am. Asleep at 12:00 pm. Up at 12:30 pm. Gave her the chance to go back to sleep for 45 minutes. She didn’t bite.
• Nighttime (Sunday): Down at 7:00 pm. Asleep by 7:15 pm. (Way to go, EM.) Awake at 6:00 am. (11 hours!)
• First nap (Monday): Down at 10:00 am. Asleep immediately. Awake at 11:15 am
• Second nap (Monday): Down at 3:00 pm. Up at 4:00 pm.
• Nighttime (Monday): Down at 8:00 pm. Asleep by 8:30 pm. Slept until 6:00 am.
• First nap (Tuesday): 8:30 am – 9:15 am
• Second nap (Tuesday): 11:30 am – 12:15 pm
• Nighttime (Tuesday): 6:15 pm – 6:15 am (12 hours!)

And with that, I’ll declare that it took 9 days all told to get her back “on schedule”. She’s not quite back to where she was. She’s waking up at 6 am instead of 7 am, and she’s only sleeping in 1 hour increments instead of 1.5 hours during her naps. So she still has a little bit to go but she is back to being happy and not too tired on a regular basis.

Half the problem (or more) was that Empirical Mom was gone on business for several days just after we got back. Little EC’s routine didn’t settle properly until EM returned. I think there was a healthy dose of separation anxiety thrown in to the mix for awhile there.

Next time, I won’t try so hard to get her back on schedule. I’ll let her sleep all she wants when she wants, and make very gentle nudges back toward normal schedule. It seems to me that she can’t possibly take more than 9 days to get back on schedule no matter what, and I’d much rather be dealing with a rested and not-unhappy baby during that time.

Lesson learned.