Daylight Slavings

Any parent of young children will tell you that the Summer Solstice is not the longest day of the year (or Winter Solstice for those of you in the southern hemisphere). The longest day of the year is that day in the fall when Daylight Savings ends and you have to move the clock back an hour.

Oh, you say, I love that day because I get an extra hour of sleep! Screw you I say. Screw you straight to hell. Daylight Savings time being a harbinger of more or less sleep ended the day I stepped off of that plane with a 7 month old baby under my arm.

The spring clock movement isn't that big of deal. Oh sure, you lose an hour of time during the day, but being that it's the weekend, it's not like there's a lot that has to be done. From a bed time perspective, you put them to bed, they grumble about not being tired because it's an hour early, you say tough noogies and then in the morning you have to pry them out with a crowbar.

Fall is when all of the trouble starts. For one, once you get up, you have to move all of the clocks back, provided that you didn't do it the night before. Either way sucks, because most likely, your kids will be up early as all hell, only with the clock movement, it's even earlier, and even more hellish. Then, you have to fight the urge to put them to bed an hour earlier, as they're probably going to be tired, and if they're like my kids in pissy moods, because if you don't, they'll be up all sorts of early the next day. Oh the horrors.

These are things that they don't tell you about when you're thinking about having kids. I've seen the kinds of things that they teach you in child rearing classes, and frankly, if you don't know which end of the bottle goes in which end of the baby, you shouldn't be having one, but knowing that every year in November Father Time is going to kick you in the balls is of utmost importance. Once my kids are older to where they can either manage themselves in the morning without my assistance, or they sleep later than I do, this won't be a problem, but for now, it makes for a long Sunday.

Luckily, this past Sunday the kids were well behaved, for the most part, not counting the usual sibling squabbles we're so used to refereeing. We did pick Sunday to do a boat load of yard work, on top of my time spent configuring a wireless print server and making the next night's dinner as if we had forgotten that daylight savings was upon us, or worse, we foolishly felt that we could use that extra hour to be productive. By the end of the evening I was exhausted and disoriented to the point that when I woke up in the morning, I spent ten minutes getting myself ready to get out of bed only to look at the clock and see that it was 3:30, a full hour before I had to get up.

Father Time strikes again.