Daylight Savings Dilusion

This past weekend was daylight savings time. I am aware that some states in the country do not participate in this brilliant tradition, but I happen to live in one of the forty-eight that does. It is really quite an amazing phenomenon where you go to bed one night and while you are sleeping you "gain" an hour of sleep. Do you really "gain" an hour of sleep? Can you really "gain" an hour of anything by simply turning your clock back by an hour? Next time you are talking about "gaining" or "losing" an hour in the Fall and Spring you should talk to the parent of a young child. Kids do not understand the whole daylight savings thing. They simply wake up when their bodies tell them to wake up and go to sleep when their parents tell them it is night time. Our two precious little ones awoke on Sunday morning at 6:00 am. Their bodies communicated to them that it was in fact 7:00 am, their typical wake up time. My wife and I had to gently educate them on the fact that it was still "nighttime" even though it looked exactly like it did the day before when it was "morning time!" Kids just cannot wrap their minds around such an obtruse concept. I am not attempting to dig up the history of this madness, just make a few passing comments about how this affects the majority of us who have children.

Sunday night I had the pleasure of working the 3:00 pm to 11:00 pm shift at work. Now I am not complaining about the fact that I missed out on the previous nights overnight shift where Stephen had to work an extra hour. I am however commenting on the fact that the day after daylight savings is always a difficult night to stay up, especially when you have kids. One of my duties at work is to lock up the tennis/soccer complex on campus at dusk. Well since we had rolled our clocks back it was prior to dinner that I had to make this happen. As I locked the gate I thought to myself, "my it sure feels like it is about 9:00 pm." I am really a fan of the extra hour of light in the morning, but the nights can become very long and depressing for those of us who live north of I-90. Since I am a morning person I welcome the extra visibility on my morning runs, but is there something we could do about turning up the thermostat along with the turning on of the lights? Just a thought!

Soon the whole time change will be a thing of the past and we will not even think about it, but in the week that follows it sure can throw your entire biological clock off. Well, just like any other changes that happen in our lives we must adapt, adjust, and just keep moving forward with our lives!

Midnight Madness

Last night was one of those nights where you wonder how you were able to function when your children were infants. Our kids have been fairly decent sleepers for most of their lives, but in the past month our son and daughter seem to take turns waking up in the middle of the night for one reason or another. Last night it was the fact that our daughter needed her sheets pulled up. After pulling up her sheets and flopping back into bed, she called out requesting that I turn on the bathroom light for her. (The bathroom light shines into their room.) When this request was denied, the waterworks erupted. You would have thought that we had thrown her favorite stuffed animal (Snuffy) out the window. Even though they have a great nightlight in their room, it was not good enough for her. There is a part of the request that is pointed towards wanting some more light, but the majority of it was focused on controlling the situation. She calmed down and fell back asleep, but it through me for a loop. When your sleep is interrupted in the middle of the night, you can never seem to get a quality night of sleep. It is one thing to stumble into the bathroom at 1:47 am to use the facilities, and it is a completely different thing to have to get up and do something that requires brain power. Sure I have had to wake up and change sheets, wipe up vomit, rub a back, and re-tuck in covers, but it never ends good the next morning.

This whole episode last night made me think of a couple of fantastic people that I know and knew who were late night eaters. Uncle Steve wakes up every night around midnight, eats a large snack and then goes right back to bed. Some nights it is a banana smothered in peanut butter, other nights it is all of the pecans off of the top of his mother-in-laws pecan pie. He doesn't discriminate against food. Our old neighbor was known to wake up in the middle of the night and wolf down a large bowl of ice cream. How does one wake up in the middle of the night, eat something, and then just fall back asleep? I would be dead if I woke up in the middle of the night every night to eat something. I have a hard time eating something after about 9:00 pm. Plus, are your tastebuds really functioning at their maximum capacity in the middle of the night?