I never really thought much about the change of the clocks these past 36 years until recently. I used to get a little excited with the opportunity to gain one hour in my day but it never served a significant purpose in my life. However, once you have a little one with a very fragile sleeping schedule, all of a sudden this one hour is a monumental event and it is never in the favor of the parent. My husband and I have decided that this time change is a government conspiracy to make more money by keeping children and ultimately their parents awake. Your child sleeps less and inevitably you must use up more baby supplies which requires you to go out and buy more. And the worse thing about it is you can’t even logically explain the reasoning behind the change to your children because it is no longer based solely on the movement of the sun and the planets, it has truly become an economical event. I don’t even know when to change my clock anymore.
The way we realized that we must be close to clock-changing time is by the principle of Murphy’s law- you know the adage “anything that can go wrong will go wrong”. Basically, Nicholas is sleeping pretty much throughout the night comfortably, despite minor set-backs of new teeth and congestion. Now that we have him on a set schedule of naps and night time sleeping, here comes our man-made time change to throw us all off track. You would think that one hour wouldn’t make a huge difference in such a small person’s sleeping schedule, but it does! He will want to take his nap earlier and then go to bed earlier which leads to crying and screaming and waking up multiple times throughout the night and this will not correlate mathematically with that one hour time change. There will not be only one hour of chaos as a result. What the time change will directly correlate with is mommy not sleeping at all and daddy not sleeping as much (you know he doesn’t always hear the crying at night-how convenient).
I think we, as parents, need to fight back in efforts to take control of our own schedules. I deserve a full night’s sleep for more than 1 week at a time and the government shouldn’t be involved in destroying that. The only way to get results is to boycott! So we will not be turning our clocks back an hour next weekend. We will soundly sleep through the night, arrive at church early on Sunday and then leave before service is over. We will beat the Sunday brunch rush and calmly eat our meal. We will make it home from work before it is dark outside and beat most of the rush hour traffic. All of our parties will start on time and we won’t care if it is still dark when we start our day. As a direct result of our protest, we will be known as “early-birds”, at least for the next six months and most importantly, we will be well-rested.
Okay, I know the idea isn’t logical, not to mention that we would both be fired from our jobs after that first day of leaving early. However, I don’t anticipate any complaints about the early arrival to our respective places of employment. I just needed to voice my fear and frustration with next week’s impending sleepless nights and I can’t do anything about it but complain, so that’s what I’m doing now. Although I have probably already jinxed myself with my declaration a week before the event and something else will occur to ruin this fragile schedule we have worked so hard to achieve. I can see it now, another tooth is probably crowning at the root of my son’s gums right now as I type this blog. It is planning to make its presence known tonight around 12 am. What can you do? So is the life of a 3am mom!
