no escaping jet lag with small children

You do not rush jet lag with a toddler and a baby, at least not ours. There are no strategies. You cannot turn a nap into night sleep, you just end up awake for three hours in the deepest part of the night. Nope, their little bodies shift at their own pace, slowed by the faint Swedish light and the cold that keeps them inside and not out.

It is always harder coming east too. When we go west, they just get up at 1am, 2am, 3am and you start your day earlier and that is fine. Maybe it is because I am more a morning person, but having two kids up until 1am is less fun. Those sporadic late night naps are the worst. Then I wake up at 10am sort of panicked that the day is done, which it is not, of course.

The kids are quite happy, of course. They do not know. They just play into the night, and after five weeks off together and with family and friends, they play quite in harmony, with lots of laughter. We go to the library, the store, and we turn on music to dance after everything closes.

We shudder a bit at the cold because we are not used to it. And the apartment seems really small. I think we were away too long and our sense of space shifted, though now it is shifting back again and I do not feel like we own a fine two bedroom closet.

And I want to stop complaining because we are coming out of a glorious happy five weeks. Sun, pool, playing, travel, football, grandma and grandpa, lots of Dora the Explorer and so on. It was beautiful in the more delicate, rare sense of the word. So I apologize to any and all who had to suffer the Swedish dark … or had to work the past month.

But that is likely why we are a bit let down. We had it that good. Well, that and the cold and the dark and the jet lag, the creeping won’t go away jet lag.

the week it all changed: snow, parental leave and traveling with toddlers

In the past few days, my life has changed significantly. Yet I can find no real way to write about it.

So a simple recap. I finished work on Friday, came home, took the kids to the mall for two hours, came back home and then went to the company Christmas party. Got back home from that about 11, and I was on parental leave … until September.

The last few days of the week were not stressed out and crazy, with both E and I racing to the end of a hard four year period of our life (also the years when we figured our lives out and met our children). Nope, we were fine. This was wonderful, and a little undramatic.

It keeps snowing, more than I have seen in Sweden since my first trip here January, 2004. Sweden in the snow in the winter is indescribably better than Sweden in the winter without snow. The city glows. I take my kids out on sleds (though where are all the Swedes? You would think the park would be swarming with kids. Nope. Just a handful.)

We are packing, getting ready for entry into a 20-hour world of airports and airplanes. This is how I have to think about it, entering some alternate universe, because 20 hours is too long to contemplate with a 3 year old and a 11 month old. I do not quite understand my fear, as all our previous trips have gone better than expected.

Then we will be in the Arizona sun, with family and Christmas and a trip to California and family and friends and Arizona again, and sun and ocean and desert and back to Arizona and the pool and quieter time with grandparents and then back into that world of planes and airports. Then Sweden.

Then parental leave starts for real.