Hellobee Boards

Following because we will be taking a trip in a couple of months across the world! A 15 HR time difference, with a 2 yr 3 mo old and a 4.5 yr old.

We took our son to Vegas (3 hours earlier than us) at 22 months and he did really well. He didn't sleep too well on the flight so that first full night he was pretty tired, went to sleep at his usual time (Vegas time) and was more or less fine for the rest of the trip.

You can't avoid jet lag. We took DS from the east coast to Hawaii at 11 months. We've also traveled a number of times from Europe to the US and back and Asia too. There are so many variables between the actual travel, being in new places and sleeping in a new environment that something will throw off sleep. There's no good formula but we try to get our LOs on local time by having them nap and then waking them up after a set period of time (2 hours). Taking them outside in daylight also helps. I've heard you have to count one day for every timezone crossed to get over jet lag and that has been fairly accurate for us. When we traveled last summer from Europe to the US there was an 8 hour difference and it took 5 days for my LOs to get over the bulk of the jet lag.

We have also traveled a lot with our LOs (up to 9 time zones) and can only echo what others have said. We let ours take a nap when we get there (if we get there during the day) but wake them up and just try to spend as much time as possible outdoors as possible. We also try to quickly get into a normal routine (breakfast, lunch, dinner etc). For us the first night is usually rough and we just take the kids to our bed once they wake (usually 4-5am) and not let them get up. Often they'll fall back asleep. By the second night things are smoother, they'll get up at 6am or the like and we usually just let them get up then and start the day early but push for a normalish bedtime. By the third night things are usually close to normal. The one day per timezone rule I have found to be pretty accurate especially when traveling eastbound.

Since we travel a lot at home too we have travel cribs for each and just bring these along since they are so used to sleeping in them. We also try to create as much of the same sleep enviroment as possible. So same sleep sack/Zippy, pillow for my older LO, pacis, loveys and their water bottles.