Sunday, March 10, 2013

Daylight Savings Mess



It's like this: people look at something like Daylight Savings Time, and they think, "My gosh, it's so inconvenient to run around the house and change all those clocks!" They don't know the half of it.

First, no one even owns a VCR anymore, so there's no need to figure out how to set the time on one of those things. (Hint: It's not possible--when they were manufactured in Japan they were all programmed to perpetually blink 12:00. Payback, you know.)

Second, the time change is a completely different experience when young children are involved. Early in my married life, when I had disposable income and tools scattered about my house, Spring Forward meant losing an hour of sleep on Sunday morning. Or it meant waking up at the normal time and then realizing it was really practically lunch time and I was a lazy slob.

These days, it means that my children's biological clocks, which adjust to change about as well as the rudder of the Titanic did, are thrown off for at least a week afterward. It all starts off great on Sunday morning, when they don't come bounding into the bedroom (without knocking) until almost 8:00. But everything goes downhill from there. To make this easier to understand, I've documented it in timeline form below:

10:30 am Day 1 of daylight savings:
What do you mean you're not hungry? We eat snack every day at this time.
Oh, wait, we don't.

1:00 pm Day 1 of daylight savings:
Why aren't you in your bed? It's rest time, just like very other day.
Oh, wait, it's not.

7:30 pm Day 1 of daylight savings:
Why are you jumping rope in the basement? It's your bed time.
Never mind, it's really not.

7:02 am Day 2 of daylight savings:
Seriously? Doesn't your body think it's 6:00 am? How are you awake already?

The days that follow are a mass of confusion: late bed times, early waking times, altered meal times. Eventually an equilibrium is reached wherein the kids go to bed later and wake up earlier, all in the name of keeping the lights off a few minutes longer in the evening.

I'm sure everything will made right in the fall though.


2 comments:

  1. How delightful! A teacher with a sense of humor and transparent compassion as well. God Bless. I found you through your article in Teachers of Vision magazine.

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    1. Thanks for checking things out here, Dale. I hope you enjoyed the article in TVM as well.

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