jet lag.... am I about to ruin everything :(

[Scarlett175]

as per title I am taking DD to San Fran for Xmas, she will be 8 months at time of travel, and has for the last month started to sleep through, after a world of pain for 5 months.

Am posting this here and in Long Haul, but are there any tips to getting her sleep back to normal once we return... this is our current routine at bedtime:

6pm- bottle feed downstairs with mum
6.20pm- dad arrives home takes upstairs for bath
6.45pm- dad lays her in cot, reads story
6.55pm- lights off, dad stays til she settles, stops fussing

usually asleep by 7pm ish

PS. Don't hate me!! took ages to get to this point. Prior to this have BF to sleep/co-slept, you name it, I have tried it!!

Any help or thoughts appreciated, I am looking forward to my first holiday since DD born but dreading the aftermath :(

We recently took our 8.5 month old to NY. I was really worried but it has been fine! We timed the flight out so that we left at 4pm UK time and arrived at 8pm US time (ish). We planned to only let her take a short-ish nap on the flight out if at all possible and the noise and distraction made that easy - she didn't even seem cranky.

She was so knackered by the time we got there that we did our normal bedtime routine and she went down a treat and, though she did wake a couple of times in the night, she didn't seem to notice the time difference all holiday.

On the way back we took a night flight and by the time we had taken off it was so late for her that she was exhausted and we were able to put her down for about 4 hours sleep. Once we landed we just pretended she'd had a normal night's sleep and though she was a bit cranky she went down that night as normal and slept solidly for 13 hours.

Her sleep was brilliant for the week after we got back (actually better than when we went) but now she has her top two teeth coming through so it's pretty hellish.

The time difference didn't seem to cause her any problems though.

One thing I did try to do one the way out was start to move her bedtime later by 30 mins each day so that the difference wasn't so great. I didn't bother doing this in reverse on the way back, but might have done if we'd stayed longer.

Good luck!