I hate Daylight Saving Time.
I hate Daylight Saving Time. Okay, I do love summer nights when it doesn’t get dark until late. But I swear, a raving lunatic invented this time change stuff. Who else would think it was convenient to change the time by an hour every six months? I mean, please. Find a time you like and stick to it. Is that so much to ask?
Every October and April my body clock gets completely out of whack. I never know what time it is. I’m hungry either early or late. I don’t know when to get up and when to go to sleep. I don’t even know what time I am on – I could be on Daylight Saving Time, Daylight Standard Time or Eastern Siberian Yak Time for all I know. It drives me insane.
And then there is that whole “change every clock” thing. Please. There are clocks in everything. My kitchen alone has at least 5 clocks. There are clocks in the appliances, clocks on the wall. And throughout the house there are even more clocks. In the thermostat. On the VCR. Alarm clocks. Watches. The list never ends.
And, of course, we always miss at least one clock in the great clock-changing marathon. Once, we missed changing the clock on the coffee maker. Let me tell you, if my intravenous feed from the coffee maker is delayed by one minute – let alone an entire hour – everyone pays the price. You do not mess with my morning wake-up juice.
And then there is the car stereo. Have you ever tried to change the clock in your car stereo? It’s never easy. It’s always something complicated like “face the rising sun on a Sunday with no wind, press the clock button, turn the car left four times using only your index finger to steer and press UP on the Seek button using your nose.” Frankly, I gave up on the car stereo. I figure it’s right at least six months out of the year and that’s just fine with me.
But the absolute worst part of daylight saving time is adjusting the time for your kids. It’s hard to reset a child’s internal clock. So while everyone else got an extra hour of sleep last Sunday, parents all over America were up at 5 a.m. trying to get their kids’ internal clocks reset.
It’s not pleasant. I know, because I am one of those parents. Last Sunday at 5:30 a.m., I was fuzzily trying to explain to Junior that it was still nighttime and he should get his butt back in bed before Mommy went ballistic. Now Junior is nobody’s fool. He got back in bed. And he came in five minutes later, clock in hand – the only one in the house I forgot to reset. So, at 5:36 a.m. on Sunday morning, I had to explain daylight saving time to a six-year old.
Yeah, like that worked.
So, like most parents, I spend at least about two weeks trying to get Junior to sleep past 5:30. And I am tired – literally and figuratively – of it. Why can’t we just keep on the same time? I know, I know, if we didn’t “fall back,” kids would have to walk to school in the dark. I get that argument, I really do.
But aren’t they playing soccer and doing football practice and everything else now in the dark? I mean, when it’s dark at 5:30 p.m., it’s not like the kids are in their homes eating dinner. No, they are out on the fields, trying to find the glow-in-the-dark soccer cones without kicking a teammate.
And it’s not just when daylight saving time ends that I have a problem. Springing forward has its own little obstacles. I spend a week or so dragging Junior’s butt out of bed so he can make it to school before the tardy bell rings. And he falls asleep much earlier too – usually right in the middle of playing Legos. He just leans forward, falls onto the Lego pile and starts snoring away.
Which brings me back to my original complaint. I hate changing the time. I hate changing any clock, internal or external. But most of all, I hate digging the Lego’s out of Junior’s cheek or waking up at 5:30 a.m.
And, unlike Daylight Saving Time, that will never change.
Laurie Sontag is a Gilroy stay at home mom who wishes parenthood had come with a how-to guide. She can be reached at am************@ya***.com
