Lately, my kids have been doing this fun thing where they wake up just a little bit earlier every day. I say “fun,” but I mean “awful.” Absolutely, unequivocally awful. I saw the light on in my daughter’s room when I got up to pee at 5:00 a.m. this morning and I could hear her sifting around in her Legos. My son tried to wake up at 4:30 a.m. this week before I marched in like a drill sergeant barking about how it was the middle of the night. I used to beg them to get up at 7:00 a.m., and now I’d pretty much jump through hoops of fire to get them to stay in their rooms until after 6. Just let dawn break. For the love of all that is holy, sleep!
I was thinking to myself, at least it can’t get much worse, right? Like, they have to be close to reaching their minimal sleep limit. They won’t start getting up at 3:30 or 4 in the morning, right?
But then I remembered, no, that is not true at all. Because guess what? The end of Daylight Saving Time is right around the corner and that 5:00 a.m. wake up is most definitely going to become a 4:00 a.m. wake up, and I am going to lose all remaining faith in humanity.
Let’s just say it: Daylight Saving Time is the worst and someone needs to put an end to it. Every parent I know feels me on this, on a deep, primal level. We are already sleep deprived. We are already fighting the good fight at bedtime. We are exhausted just trying to keep our sleep “schedules” from going to shambles. The last thing we need is an unnecessary clock change messing with our kids’ circadian rhythm twice a year.
Better yet, let’s just make Daylight Saving Time permanent, because no one likes Standard Time anyway. It makes it get dark outside earlier. It makes my kids get up during what is basically the dead of night. No one needs sunlight that badly in the morning hours of winter, right? No one wants to be eating dinner at 5:30 p.m. in the dark. It’s sadistic, really, the whole darn thing.
I sometimes think back fondly to my college days when I truly enjoyed returning to Standard Time. Sure, it was going to start getting dark out earlier, and that kind of sucked, but I was also going to get to sleep in for an extra hour! It made losing daylight a bit more comforting. I remember lying awake in bed in the morning, thinking about how just last week I would’ve had to be in Spanish class instead of under the covers.
What a blissful, delicious time that was.
Now the concept of “gaining” an extra hour seems positively laughable. There are no gains here, only losses. Dealing with sleep with three young children is always a losing battle. Thanks to Standard Time setting back in, I will now have another full hour of morning tantrums, kids who are hungry at the wrong time of day, and a 4:00 a.m. alarm (otherwise known as my daughter standing inches from my face before whisper-yelling that she wants her gummy vitamins and breakfast).
Seriously, can we just pick a single time and stick with it year round? For parents’ sake? For humanity’s sake? Can we all just pool our money together and lobby Congress to do this one useful thing? Because people, I am already tired, and I don’t even want to think how tired I’m going to be after November 5th.