If you are wondering how our jetlag is coming along …

It is now 11:30 p.m. in Sicily, and I give it about 70 percent odds that one or both of my kids will be awake in the next 30 minutes demanding food.

After we eventually get them back to bed, Chris and I are likely to be eating chips and watching TV at about 2 a.m.

So, not great so far. Especially considering we’ve been home nearly a week.

I’m honestly not sure what the problem is this time around. The kids adjusted remarkably quickly the first time we landed in Sicily and we were adjusted to the schedule within a couple days. I was fairly shocked.

In Chicago, they did much better than I expected as well. We landed at about 6 p.m. Chicago time (2 a.m. Sicily time) and we were all sleep by about 8 p.m. The kids woke up for several days between 3 and 5 a.m., but since I was also awake at that time it wasn’t actually a big deal. My only issue was being completely unable to stay awake past 8 p.m. most nights — I fell asleep when I was trying to get them to sleep.

That’s not to say it was a completely seamless transition. Owen slept from 2:30 p.m. one day until 4:30 a.m. the next, though honestly I blame that as much on a total lack of naps and too much excitement as much as I do jetlag. As for Fiona? Well, see below.

Baking cookies with her cousins was just exhausting.

But none of this even remotely compares with the madness we’ve got going on over here. As I mentioned, they keep waking up about midnight complaining that they are hungry, or thirsty, or want to watch movies. (That last one is our fault — the first night this happened we were sympathetic and let them come downstairs and watch TV with us). We weren’t overly surprised by this the first couple of days (more surprised it didn’t happen last time), but it has gotten old very quickly. It’s not that I don’t sympathize: when I got back from a six-month study abroad in Australia, I spent a few days waking up at 3 a.m. so hungry that I couldn’t sleep. So I’m obviously going to hook them up with some middle of the night snacks if they need them, but I’m just hoping this wears off. Like, soon.

One good piece of news, however, is that they aren’t waking us up. Because we aren’t asleep either. It is less weird for me to be up late because I often am, for what Chris likes to term “no reason.”* But usually not EVERY NIGHT and not THIS LATE. Meanwhile it is absolutely bizarre for Chris for this to be happening. The first few nights he actually did try to go to bed, only to emerge at like 1:30 in the morning and ask if I wanted to watch our show some more. So we ended up watching Goliath several days this week around 2/3 a.m. (bonus: so few people are up then we are actually able to stream things on our crappy internet).

It hasn’t been all terrible, to be honest, though I’m ready for the middle-of-the-night nonsense to stop. But the first night home we ended up on the couch in the middle of the night and Fiona was kind of slap-happy. She started laughing for no apparent reason, which made Chris and I laugh, which made Owen join in too. So the four of us just lay there on the couch laughing and laughing and laughing for no clear reason. If someone had been looking through the window, they probably would have thought we should make sure the gas was off.

*There’s always a reason.