Move over summer solstice. You have nothing on End-Of-Daylight-Savings Day.
Saturday night I checked to see if Matthew had turned his clock back before bed. He hadn't so I made a mental note of it and went to sleep. When the children, those lovely songbirds of the morn, came traipsing into our bedroom today I looked over at the clock to see that it read "5:35." Good God. If it read 5:35 that meant it was actually 4:35 and of course that's what time I could expect to be waking for the rest of the week. This is an EXTREMELY unfortunate way to start any day. Even more unfortunate than just being woken at 5:35. We finally got the kids, through a mixture of firm words, outright threats, and abject begging, to stay in their rooms until the clock said 6:30, which of course, I calculated, was actually 5:30. I went downstairs with them at that point and was basically in tears. Until I saw the kitchen wall clock. An analog piece of crap that runs off one AA battery that I didn't bother turning back the night before. The big hand was on the 7 and the little hand was on the 6, AKA 7:30. Confused yet? I stood there staring at it and realized that Matthew's new alarm clock falls back all by itself. A feature I must have known about since I bought the damn thing (FYI, compulsive manual reader, here). So I got to start this dumb day with double the time angst. Really not okay. Either all the clocks in the world need to change themselves for Daylight Savings or none of them should have this functionality. Otherwise we are headed to chaos. CHAOS, I TELL YOU. Of course, I only have to get up at 5:30, not 4:30, for the next week so, hey, bonus!
And that was just the beginning. It's now only 9:37 PM and I feel like I have lived half my lifetime in this day. Do you know how many words a (nearly) 6-year-old can compulsively spell out to you given an extra hour? Or, with those extra minutes, how many times a 3-year-old can shriek directly into your ear that she does not want to wear her coat? Or her hat? Or her shoes? Or any clothes in general that are not softy-soft? People, let's just say that number contains many, many zeroes. Every single time I checked my watch today it was followed by a sotto voce string of swear words. And of course there was all that early darkness to look forward to. Yay! Thanks a lot, farmers! Just happy that this dumb day with its dumb time change is over. Dumb time and its stupid artificial linear construct. Grumble. Zzzzzzzzzzzzzz...
I just wept a bit in hysterics. I played the same game that morning, although I didn't know how grateful I should have been for the analog bedroom clock.
Posted by: jennifer c. | November 09, 2010 at 09:53 PM