Life Post-China

We've now been home from China for just over three days, but it's been hard to get back into the swing of blogging. Our routine in China usually gave me an hour or two of down time in the morning to write, but now jetlag is working in the opposite direction. Speaking of jetlag, dealing with a jetlagged one-year-old is no fun. In China Stanzi was pretty good about sleeping; in fact, she slept straight through the night a few times. But here it's been a struggle, for understandable reasons. Last night, however, things were much better. We made a point yesterday of limiting her sleeping during the day, so by 8:30 she was in her crib, completely crashed. She woke up at 2:30 or so, and was awake for a couple of hours, but that's still a huge improvement over the last couple of nights.

Aside from the sleep thing, Stanzi has adjusted remarkably well to everything here. She's enjoying her many toys (especially the Rainforest Jumperoo shown in the video), and her introduction to the dogs went very smoothly. There was some initial screaming when Lotte tried to lick her face, but she quickly bounced back from that, and soon was reaching out to pet them (well, more like grab them, but Lotte and Ruby don't seem to mind). For the dogs' part, it only took them until her first feeding to know that when Stanzi eats food will miraculously drop to the floor, so all they need do is wait next to her booster seat in order to get a tasty treat. In fact, Stanzi seems to be taking great delight in sharing her meals with Lotte and Ruby.

I'm not sure how much blogging we'll be doing in the next few days. I'm swamped with university-related work (it's amazing how much of a backlog of grading builds up over two weeks), and later this week I'm off to do a couple of seminars for high school teachers. Monica may have some things to add, but she's pretty busy with the normal baby routine. But for now, things are going very well, and where they aren't, at least they're headed in the right direction.