Long summer evenings disrupt kids' sleep patterns
Long summer evenings are usually a joy. But when we visited the Baltics in June with our two year old daughter, we hadn't realised how much of a mixed blessing they would prove to be!We live in Johannesburg, which is not far south of the Tropic of Capricorn. As a result, there isn't much difference in the length of days between summer and winter, and our children have been brought up in a routine of 'going to bed with the sun and rising with the sun'.This is fine until you find yourself in Lithuania in mid summer, where it doesn't get dark until 23:00 and begins to get light again about 04:00. Furthermore, most of the places that we stayed had thin curtains - presumably to maximise light during the dark winter months? - so it was impossible to create dark conditions conducive to sleep. As a result, by the end of our fortnight, we were all suffering from sleep deprivation!It didn't stop...
