The pressure was on. It was the third trip over to Washington for Aunty A so in theory there are no more excuses. Plus the visit of Nanny and Gramps in April had in fact proved that there is no such thing as jet-lag – it’s all in the mind. So how exactly would Sally fare this time around? Well. In summary I think we can safely say there has been an uptick in her performance and there appear to be a few clear drivers of this success.
Stage one to conquering the imaginary force of jetlag is to not go to bed too early. Over her first week Sally has managed this successfully – managing to stay up fairly consistently to around 10pm each night (and sometime a little later). We can thank her second wind for this feat – a wind that normally arrives at around 8:30pm after she has recovered from a heavy afternoon drinking and shopping!
The second stage appears to be alcohol related. Don’t drink too much or at least try to avoid post 5pm. Which soon changed to 6pm. The lack of wine in the evening appears to make the difference because it means you can knock back a valium, sleeping pill and any other drugs you happen to carry around with you (and that appears to be quite a few – all strictly legal though!) just before heading off to sleep.
The third stage is not looking at the clock when you wake up in the night – it will only annoy you. Sally isn’t very good at this. It’s fair to say that she’s a bit of a clock watcher. Having said that, with stage 1 and 2 mastered there have been some consistent nights where 6 or 7 hours sleep have been had; and if we think back to previous visits that’s the equivalent of about a weeks worth of sleep on those trips!
The other positive is that after going to sleep she hasn’t had the soul destroying experience of waking up the same day that you fell asleep – there’s nothing worse than that.
So there we go. One week in and Aunty A is doing pretty well. By the time she comes out to visit for the 7th time I think she’ll have it cracked!