Back in the US, Jetlagged with two kids

I’m back! I don’t know why but my blog was blocked again in the last few weeks of my stay in China so I couldn’t write any random thoughts.

Anyways, we’ve been back for a couple days now and eegh! – it is always a pain to adjust jetlag coming this way. It’s just harder. My husband and I debated how to do it again, like we do every year. Do we adjust backwards or forwards? IE: do we let them sleep later everyday, or wake them up earlier everyday.  So I point him to my blog entry that I wrote last time about adjusting jetlag: http://pj.moretang.com/2009/02/09/adjusting-your-babies-jet-lag/ and we agree to do it my way. We’ll wake them up one hour early each day and pray they sleep an hour early that night.

So far it’s going pretty well. I think partly because we know what to expect and partly because the kids are older now. First night my 2 year old slept from 2 am until 10 am. My 1 year old son has not done as well, waking up in the middle of then night for several hours and breaking up his sleep patterns into several long naps. Finally I decided he needed one long sleep cycle, a good 9 hours and made sure he got that.

I think because I’m not as worried about them not adjusting, I’m also letting them sleep more during the day. I remember part of the worry before is “what if they sleep too much and don’t sleep at night?”. And we push off their nap and push off and push off, until either 1) they can’t take it anymore and crash too early just to wake up in the middle of the night or 2) they are too jittery to have a good nights sleep.  So this time it appears they are sleeping the right amount and still sleeping well at night.

A fun chat I had with my husband this morning:

me:  i have no problems falling asleep before 12

after 12, after our son wakes up

i have insomnia

until my hunger goes away

there is probably a quick solution for that

my husband:  lol

i don’t know if the word for that is “insomnia”

you should start eating our son.  two birds, one stone

Infant Classes in China

Our main goal for coming to China as often as we do, is to have my kids become fluent in Mandarin Chinese.  Both my husband and I know how hard it will be to ask them to take an interest in the language when they get older. As both him and I have struggled with our own parents against learning Mandarin.

One of the barriers of putting our kids in school here is they require some lab work. It’s not a huge barrier, but taking your kids to the hospital to get a needle stick is never fun. However, this year, our neighborhood school started a parent participation infant class that doesn’t require the lab work. It’s great because both my kids can also be in the same class. That’s twice a week.

For the other days of the week we’re going to Gymboree. Today my daughter started art class and painted with her fingers. My son went to gym. I think these next few weeks will pass very quick for them with classes everyday.

NOSY OR JUST MORE CARING – CHINESE CULTURE?

At lunch, my mother-in-law: Nina, brought up an interesting thought.  It seems to her that people here in China are a lot more bossy of each other, in a good way.  IE: During a simple meal, people would routinely tell their family and friends to eat more, even if they already had a standard sized meal, they should have another bowl of rice or soup.  In US, if you were eating a simple meal with a good friend and you told them to eat more, they might look at you weird.

The part that is kind of off putting is that what if it wasn’t your friend or family member that was doing this, but a random stranger in the street? This is definitely something we have noticed during our stays in China, than random people would come up to us and give us random advice – as if they knew us.

Why is that?

Subsequently, we could not help but start sharing our stories of when and where we have been given advice out of the blue on the streets of China.

Once my husband and I were walking on a street with our 15 month old daughter. She had her pacifier with her because it was close to her nap time. I believe we were walking her to try to get her to sleep. A random grandma type person crossed our path and yelled at us for letting our daughter use a pacifier and said it would ruin her teeth.

Once my husband and I was at the Beijing Zoo. I was 34 weeks pregnant. A couple of grandma type persons again first asked us for directions to get out of the zoo. We told them. Then, looking at my bulging belly, one of them told my husband that he should not sleep with me for the next few weeks.

Coincidentally right after we had this fun conversation about how it’s just so different here in China and how in US people just don’t butt into other people’s business – it happened again. My mother-in-law, I, and my son walked my husband out to the gates to wait for his ride to send him back to US.

Yet again, a grandma liked person started talk to us by asking “Where are you going?” “Wow these are nice luggage”. “Is it expensive or cheap?” She even went ahead to lift one of them for a feel without asking. Went on to say how much my son looked like by husband. And my husband not like her mother, but if he had he would be even more handsome. Where were we from. If I was from Taiwan, was my parents still in Taiwan. On and on and on.

Maybe it’s just these grandma types in China.