Meet the new boss, he's the same as the old boss?

** Warning - long potentially boring post about baby sleep habits and the effects of jetlag thereon.**

Baby jetlag is nothing to mess around with.

We returned from Chicagoland - a seven hour time difference - November 30th. It took eight full days for Small Boy to begin falling asleep at something approximating his pre-trip bedtime. Then for another week after that although he fell asleep at the old time he did not sleep like the old Boy. The pre-trip Boy slept close to 12 hours with one night waking - usually sleeping from about 6:30 p.m-ish to about 6:15 a.m-ish and the night waking...well, let's just say it came at three - dru in Swiss German. I say this because it just became our inside joke to call any time the Boy woke dru. Eleven-thirty pm? It's dru! One am? It's dru! Sometimes, he would actually wake at dru. The point is, he woke once and we could live with that, but after the trip he turned into a twice a night waker. That kicked my butt and only stopped about one week ago. So two weeks after returning to Switzerland, he still had some weird jetlaggy thing going on.

Then came week three. He was sleeping nights like the old Boy - 12ish hours and a single night nursing. Days? Naps? He used to nap. Not super long naps, and not every day, but after a lot of work and tinkering, we had turned Small Boy into a decent two seventy minute naps a day napper. Now? It seems somebody let Small Boy watch Treasure of the Sierra Madre while we were in Chicagoland because his new catch-phrase is "Naps? I don't need no stinking naps." (Yeah, I know, that's not exactly the line.) Twenty-five minutes, people. Twenty. Five. Minutes. He looks like a freshman during finals week - or, even worse, a professor during final grade preparation. Dark circles, red-rimmed eyes. Who ever heard of a baby with bags under his eyes? I'm waiting for social services to take one look at his sleep deprived little face and take him away, except we live in Switzerland and they don't do things like that here. Lucky for me.

So here we are, entering the fourth full week of what I can only assume are after-effects of jetlag.

And then something interesting happened. Remember I said pre-trip bedtime was around 6:30 pm, and that often meant a 6:15 am wake-up call? Well, we used the opportunity of jetlag to edge his bedtime back to about 7pm, and this has resulted in a 7 am or sometimes even, gasp, 7:15 am wake-up call. Wow. Heaven. Wow. Yesterday, however, Small Boy was wiped out. Desperate- mommy- I-am-so-tired-I'm-going-to-die wiped out, so he went to bed at 6:30 p.m, woke up at 6:40 a.m and guess what?

We just hit minute 76 of the morning nap.

Could it be that Small Boy is a naturally early riser, and the 45 minute shift in his wake-up time was wacking his whole day? Or is this just coincidence? Like Phantom, I am always looking for the magic bullet that will solve the sleep issues. Could this be it? Do we have to put up with early rising to have a well-rested Boy?

I don't know, but we just hit minute 83, and we are soooo trying this again tomorrow.