My first born is under 2 years of age and she has already been back to China three times.  Dealing with jet lag is always a pain, especially when coming back to the US.  However, I believe my husband and I are really getting better at it. 

This last time was different, because now we have two babies.  We’ve looked up the internet on this jetlag issue before and the advice is always to adjust them early, even before you get on the flight.  But most of the advice is assuming people are traveling between states, not halfway around the world. 

This time, we followed the advice. We let the babies sleep later and later everyday so that they were going to be around 11:30 to midnight.  We did this because our flight to China was leaving at 12:30 am.  So we figured it’s better that they can stay awake until the plane takes off. 

Going to China is 15 hours, coming back is 12 to 13 hours. 

Going to China – our bedtime is their afternoon (around 2 to 3 pm). So it’s not that bad. We just go to sleep around 2/3pm and wake up around 2/3 am. And we move that back by 1 to 2 hours everyday. It’s actually kind of nice to finally be an early bird for once. 

Coming back is always the hard part. Because now, our bedtime is like 8 am in the morning. It really doesn’t help to go to sleep at 8 am in the morning and then wake up 8 pm at night and just be awake all night. In the past, we’ve also tried to adjust backwards where we made our daughter sleep an hour later each day. That really took a long time to adjust – almost 3 weeks. And it was painful. This time, we adjusted forwards. We would wake our daughter up and hour early each day. This worked so much better. She adjusted pretty much in a week.

We really couldn’t apply the same strategy to our son – the younger one.  So that was the tough part. As my daughter got adjusted and he didn’t – I found myself being up all the time. As soon as she fell asleep, he would wake up.

Either way, it hasn’t even been two full weeks and they are both adjusted now and I’m just happy I can get 6 hours of sleep per night.

I think this experience is preparing me for residency.