Time, She Is a Cruel Bitch

Oooh, Lord.  Every damn year. 

 

How much sleep did you get this weekend?  Were your children up at the crack of dawn (or before!), like devils wanting to dance around a cauldron calling forth the Daylight Saving Time demons to ruin your day?  Mine were.

 

There’s just no winning, you know?  We kept the kids up loooong past their bedtimes on Saturday, a day when neither of them have good naps – Jamie usually naps three hours at preschool, but only ever gets close to two at home, while Charles skips his nap entirely on the weekends – and hoped, against hope, that they would sleep through the time change in the morning.

 

Alas, it was not to be.  Jamie awoke at quarter to five, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, ready to be up.  Tony and I were not quite so ready.

 

And, apparently, we have learned nothing as parents of early risers and non-sleepers.  You see, we always, always, try to get the kids to go back to sleep when they get up early, and it never ends well.  We bring them to bed with us to coax them back to slumber.  We leave them in their crib to cry themselves back to sleep (we are TERRIBLE, I know).  We take them downstairs to the couch or recliner to see if a change of scenery and a dark, quiet room will put them back to sleep.  But it NEVER WORKS.  Never, ever.  Jamie shrieked and cried his way to six am on Sunday, when I finally got up with him.  I should have just taken him to Denny’s or something at five.  Tony got up and went to basketball.  Shoot, I could have taken him for a run in the jogging stroller, but no, I tried for that extra sleep.  By six am, Charles was up, too.

 

This morning was no different in it’s idiocy.  Charles was up at six and crawled into bed with us, but did he go back to sleep?  No, he did not.  He squirmed and kicked and wriggled.  But still I tried to make him sleep.  Still, I tried to settle myself back into sleep for twenty minutes or so.  Those twenty minutes trying to get back to sleep while a child is awake are the worst sleep.  When will I learn to just get out of bed?  Make some coffee and breakfast?  Enjoy a leisurely perusal of the morning paper?  Probably when my bed stops being so damned comfortable and I get to sleep the whole night through.

 

Jamie, on the other hand, was up in the middle of the night for an hour or so last night, which was the awesomest awesome time of awesome, and by the time he finally went to sleep, I was fully awake.  At two am.  Then he slept until 7:30 am, even after Charles was up and making a boatload of noise at six. 

 

Don’t let that shit-eating grin fool you; he’s plotting to kill me with sleep deprivation.

It seems to me that the country was working toward getting rid of Daylight Saving Time during the Bush years – didn’t we keep moving Fall Back later in the year and Spring Forward earlier (I was about to say something about pushing back and pushing up, but as Tony has routinely pointed out, I don’t use these terms correctly: I always thing that pushing back means making something later and that pushing up means making something earlier, but he assures me it’s the opposite.  And I get confused, so I try to avoid those terms)?  But we seem to have abandoned that trajectory.  I think most of the parents in the U.S. would be all for getting rid of Daylight Saving Time altogether.  I wonder what the cost to the nation is in lost productivity due to children’s sleep schedules being all messed up?