Hello everybody,
This is my first post here, and I'm reaching out to you in a state of desperation...
I have an 8 month old baby and we are just coming back from visiting family in the US (we live in Europe). Going over there was okay, everybody adapted quite easily. But then we came back home... and all hell broke lose !
First, the little one has been going through separation anxiety for about a week so that alone made bedtime pretty much hysterical. We took everybody's advice on how to deal with baby's endless red-faced-crying-leg-kicking-paci-throwing at bedtime and multiple night wakings (he was until then a pretty decent sleeper, with a consistent routine) but we didn't have much success.
Now we add to that a 9h jetlag eastbound that messed with everybody's sleep.
Yesterday we managed to have baby down for the night at 7pm, his regular bedtime, but he woke up at 9pm... to never sleep again. At 4am, after a thousand back and forth to comfort, soothe, rock and nurse him to no avail, we decided that we would just resort to cosleeping now as this is the only way he would sleep at all, and deal with the consequences later. At 5am our time, everybody fell asleep, and we all woke up at 3pm today... We are doomed.
It seems that his internal clock is still pretty much set on pacific time, where we were on vacation : his "night" of sleep from 5am to 3pm our time correspond to 8pm to 6am pacific time.
Now we as adults have a hard time adapting to the time change, but we can rationalize it. The little one, however, does not so we end up being forced on his schedule.
We don't know how to fix it, as 9 hours is a damn long time to work on with baby steps... We will be back to work in 4 days and he will be in daycare. I am desperate to have everybody's sleep fixed before that.
Please help...