Tag: long haul

Long haul travel and sleep with a baby

So we got to New Zealand with an unsuccessful stopover, but what then?

Was Evie going to adapt quickly or slowly to the time change, without having the adult rationale of making yourself stay awake in the evening to try and force sleep in the night.

The quick answer is it has taken a good two weeks to find a decent sleep pattern again. And then we wreck it with some long drives!

To begin with she woke in the night and just wanted to play, jumping and clambering on us at 3am. Then by the time she finally falls back to sleep at gone 5am you are then incapable or returning to sleep as an adult (good for early morning runs as someone who doesn’t normally ‘do mornings’!).

Then the playing stopped but waking three times a night for milk, slowly down to two, one…. and after three weeks she finally slept through the night.

So our advice is to allow for the fact that you will be even more tired than normal, and more again from your own jet lag and more again from your babies!! As parents we both got a bit ill I think just from total lack of sleep.

Fingers crossed Evie sleeps through again tonight!

Long haul flights

With an 8 month old, we were not expecting an amazing flight experience getting from one side of the globe to the other. But we did try to make it as easy as possible, or so we thought.

We booked basonette’s on both flights and allowed ourselves plenty of time. And because we were going through Hong Kong we thought it sensible to have a nights stop off to catch up on sleep that we neither anticipated, or got, on the flight.

In reality that meant that we had three days of minimal sleep as opposed to two! The stop off went against us with Evie waking bright as a button at 3am. It left us good for nothing the following day and certainly no better off or re-energised for the 2nd long flight.

So our advice to you is to get to your destination without planned delays. For us at least, the stop off didn’t work.