Jet lag used to feel novel. With a baby, it’s an extension of normal life | Canada Voices

In the airplane’s blue light, the bassinet appears to be floating. It sits just above eye level and looks old enough to have been used on my first flight. Yet, here it is holding my seven-month-old son. With the lights dimmed and the cabin quiet, my partner and I half-stand to peek in and check that there is indeed a baby there, breathing. Then a blanket begins to rise and fall, and an arm spills out and dangles reassuringly.

Six hours later we’re in London, sleepwalking through the terminal. Our son is in good form, smiling at bored customs agents. We’re ahead by four hours and a full season. Snowy Toronto is a distant memory. We step off a train to the fresh breath of spring. And with it, the fog of jet lag.

I used to enjoy jet lag. J.G. Ballard wrote that it was the “nearest we can get to penitence.” For me, it was more a form of permission: to wake at 3 a.m. in a hotel room and watch Cliffhanger with German dubbing, or to wander through Tripoli’s empty medina before dawn, unbothered by the eerie silence and the dead ends.

Jet lag is a chance to see the world differently. There’s a numbness to the broader reality but an acute sensitivity to the details. Under the right conditions, it can be indulged until the familiar patterns of life resume. But with a baby, those familiar patterns are distorted. What’s a four-hour time change when you’re accustomed to waking several times a night?

If anything, jet lag is more like a return to those first, bleary days with a child.

The similarities are everywhere. In the hospital, you wake in a chair very much like an airplane seat. Lights come on without warning; unfamiliar voices give instructions. The food is to be avoided. Just about anything moves you to tears. You’ve travelled somewhere – across time zones, through hospital corridors – and emerged a different person. When you venture out into the street, strangers look at you as though they recognize you, only you’ve changed. You resort to Google Maps to find the coffee shop you’ve walked past twice. Everything is deeply felt yet barely remembered.

In London it’s about the same. Our son falls asleep just as we arrive at my sister’s flat. But the ambient excitement rouses him and it’s a couple of hours before we try for a long overdue nap. By then it’s too late. He cries in a way we haven’t heard since we counted his age in days or weeks. We know we should do the things everyone recommends: adjust meal times, get outside. But we’re tired. At 9 p.m. we turn in. He wakes and begins to shriek playfully.

On Day 3, we visit the Saatchi Gallery to show the baby some art. We wander into an exhibit called Between Waking and Wanting. It’s about “the textures of mental life,” the description reads, where “meaning remains just out of reach.” The baby’s asleep, of course. We push his stroller past the enigmatic works. One is a large, pink bedsheet, hanging from a chain and crumpled on the floor in lethargic bunches.

How to outsmart jet lag and enjoy your summer travels

Dr. Mandeep Singh, an anesthesiologist, sleep expert and associate professor at the University of Toronto, said there are three important contributors to how and when we sleep: our sleep drive, or how much pressure is built up as the day progresses, making us feel tired; the circadian drive, an internal clock that programs us to be alert during the day and to sleep at night; and the zeitgebers, or external cues, that tell the circadian drive it’s daytime or nighttime.

When we fly across time zones, it all gets confused. “This is where our internal circadian drive, our sleep drive and the zeitgebers will be misaligned with each other,” he said. “And this is where we start experiencing the symptoms of jet lag.”

It hits especially hard after our return. One morning our son wakes for an hour at 5 a.m., then goes back to sleep for three hours. Another day he won’t nap at all until late afternoon, obliterating his bedtime. He reverts to waking several times a night. He fusses like a newborn.

Don’t worry, I tell him, deliriously, at some obscene hour. It’s just that your zeitgebers are misaligned.

It will all resolve itself eventually. In the meantime, we sleepwalk along with him, as we’ve done for months, now under the cover of jet lag.

Managing jet lag with a baby

Choose the right flight: If your baby isn’t a good sleeper, avoid a red-eye, said Dr. Reshma Amin, director of sleep medicine at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children. Disrupted daytime naps are likely easier to manage than a disrupted night.

Get ahead (or behind): Try to gradually adjust the baby’s sleep schedule to the destination’s time zone over a couple of days before travelling.

Early adoption: When travelling east on an overnight flight, try to put the baby to sleep after boarding to get close to a full night’s rest on the plane. Upon arrival, adopt the new time zone right away, including meals. “When you go to the east, you have to adjust things to be earlier, so you want to expose them to natural sunlight earlier in the day,” Dr. Amin said. “Whereas, if you travel to the west, everything is later, and therefore you probably want light exposure later in the day.”

Stick with a routine: Maintaining a bedtime routine is a good idea, as it helps cue the baby for sleep even if that schedule needs to be adjusted to the new time zone. “At least you know what [the baby’s] normal is,” Dr. Amin said.