The Joys of Jet Lag

So we have made it home. The jet lag is still getting to us, but I have been trying to stay up till 10pm each night and manage to wake up by no later than 6am. Of course by 6pm, I am fighting to make it till 10pm. Hopefully this viscous cycle will end soon. Teresa got sick on the plane ride home (which was another experience itself), so she has been trying to not get Megan sick, who is working off another time zone also. It seems she has moved on from China time, but its not New York time either. Unfortunately, I have to go back to PA on Wednesday and rejoin civilization on Thursday. Not looking forward to it. Of course with limited internet access, this blog will not be getting updated as often and it will probably begin to change from all about Megan to more about how its Easter and the weatherman is promising this is the last snow storm this season (for the 20th time). Oh well. C’est la vie.

Megan was amazing on the trip home. She cried a little on the long plane ride to JFK a few times, but was so confused, who could blame her? She kept falling asleep on my arm or leg, making it fall asleep, so when I had to move, she would wake up. She and I walked around and visited other people on the plane from time to time to see how the others were doing. Most of them seemed to be out cold for a portion of the ride, much to their parents delight.

The morning that we left, we did the usual routine of the buffet breakfast at the hotel, the last meal for hours most likely and finished packing. We all meet in the lobby to take the bus to Guangzhou airport, which was a 30min ride to Hong Kong. This first plane messed up the rest of the day though. It arrived late, got disembarked late, got our bags late, boarded us late and left the runway late. LATE. It’s a short plane ride scheduled to take off at 2:45pm. Our connecting flight leaves at 5:35. We take off closer to 3:30p,, arrive in Hong Kong at 4pm, don’t get off the plane till almost 4:20pm. Do you see how this is going? The first airline checked our bags straight through to JFK so one less thing to worry about I guess. This trip through the Hong Kong airport was a little bit less confusing than the first one, but on a time crunch, this airport is just too big. By the time we find the ticket counter, there is a line and its quickly approaching 5pm. There are a few other families that were also on our end of the line and its taking forever to get our boarding cards. By the time the tickets are finally issued, it’s like 5:10pm and they are wrong. Way wrong. Each of us had our own seat, but in different rows. The woman who said that our tickets were ready and everyone has a seat managed to screw this up badly. She never flagged the 3rd seat for a child, so the seats were broken up. Why in the world anyone would think hey this woman purchased 3 tickets for the same plane and doesn’t want to sit with her party is nuts, but that’s basically what happened.

It was not just us that it happened to from our group and the guy from the airline had to walk us to the gate to make the plane, while calling the gate to see about getting seats moved. Megan can’t sit on her own. She can’t even make use of her seat unless the seatbelt light is off because she’s too young. So this guy takes us all over the place to get to us to a security line that is not the same one everyone else went through because it was on a different floor in a different building. Megan meanwhile is getting pushed in her stroller very fast and she is loving it. She must realize something is up because we haven’t heard a peep from her the entire time, but she is wide awake. We get to the gate at 5:35pm and they are still working on this seating screw up and not exactly getting results we wanted. They come up with 2 seats together in the middle, plus another seat in the dead center of the plane, 3 rows up for me. That’s nice of them. I decide that we are going to ask each person around them, starting with the guy that is sitting on the 3rd seat in a row. An aisle seat. Next to an 1yr old. It’s risky because who will seriously give up an aisle for a middle, especially on a flight as long as this, regardless of a little kid. I got the flight attendant to do it and he agreed. Thank god, because just a few hours into this trip, Teresa started to get sick. How would this have worked originally? She needs to get up and use the bathroom or just stretch and she then carries Megan over to me, over people’s heads. Gee, people would have been loving it. I didn’t see it really lasting. The point of the 3 seats was so that we had some more room to spread out. That middle seat allowed for Ms. Wiggle Worm to have a few inches of freedom, gave us the chance to have a little bit more stretch room and more surface for everything else we needed.

Of course, the first 2 hours of our flight was non-stop turbulance so we were attached to our seats and there was no food being given out. Unfortanetly for us, we hadn't eaten since about 9am that morning and were dying by the time the flight took off at 6pm. They brought Megan 2 little dinner rolls and she had the insides and we attacked the outsides. The food was not as good as it was on the way over either so we were pretty disappointed, even though it was a shorter flight (2 hours is 2 hours). Immigration and customs were not too bad. The valuable brown envelope that Teresa had been carrying was finally handed over and Megan is now a US Citizen! Yay!

Currently we have spread out in grandma and grandpa’s house for a few days. Teresa got some medicine yesterday and is starting to shake what she came down with. We have been trying to entertain Megan and get her used to the time difference and new people. We seem to be her comfort zone after a little bit of time with someone else till she has warmed up. She is doing well, although the teething is coming fast and strong. Grandma got us the homeopathic teething tablets so she seems to be better now that we have our own supply. Somehow with all the bartering of stuff in China, we came back with enough Cheerios to build a house. Megan is still very messed up with the time difference, but is taking more naps throughout the day to catch up. It seems to be helping and is getting closer to US time. I am still off of the time by a few hours. By 8pm I am fighting to make it to 9pm. I have been trying to get to 10pm but I think I have passed out before then most nights. I am up at 5 or 6am though, so if anyone has an early morning job, I might be on that schedule. Or any job in general would be great. Keep me in mind. I’ll answer phones, or anything you need me to do.

Anyways, I hope you have all enjoyed reading the blog and seeing how the journey was. As I said before, this will not be getting updated as frequently and the contents will change over time. I will probably not be getting to see Miss Megan for a month or so, but when I see her again I will post about it with pictures. I am going to sleep now. I actually started this post on my laptop around 4:30am today, but was unable to post it from there...the internet was being funny and then I was entertaining Megan for a while until visitors came to see her. So this was started when I first woke up and is finally being posted hours and hours later on Grandma's computer. Of course since I'm about to fall asleep, I can't be bothered to reread what I wrote earlier so I really hope it was in English and not a made up language. Thanks for reading and see you all one day soon I hope....