Daylight Saving

seems to me to be a cruel way of inflicting sleep deprivation onto parents of small children. Since we're not farmers desperately trying to salvage those precious daylight hours, we have come to dread this twice-a-year phenomenon. In those carefree days before we had children, I used to enjoy the Fall "turn-back-the-clocks" event. That extra hour of sleep was such a nice treat. We could sleep until what felt like 10am, lounge around in our pajamas for a bit, and still make it to the 10:15 Mass on Sunday morning.

Now it's a completely different story. It's impossible to convince a 3-year-old that it's really not 6:45am (a reasonable wake-up time in this house). At 5:45, when the older girls start chatting in their bedroom, and the baby wakes and wants breakfast, we crawl out of bed and tiptoe into the bedrooms. We cover them with blankets, whisper to them that "it's still the middle of the night", and stumble back into our room, desperately hoping for a few more moments of sleep. Within minutes we hear them jumping on the bed and calling for us. The bedroom door squeaks, and they run downstairs. So we drag ourselves out of bed and surrender ourselves to their internal clocks. By 10:30 they are begging for lunch, and by dinnertime they are desperately ready for bed. And so it goes, sometimes continuing for as long as three weeks, until finally they have adjusted to the time change.

I am told that Daylight Saving was the brainchild of Benjamin Franklin. A little internet research reveals some of his other thoughts regarding how to best utilize daylight hours. Here is one example:

"Every morning as soon as the sun shall rise, church bells and, if necessary, cannons shall inform the citizenry of the advent of light and "awaken the sluggards effectually and make them open their eyes to see their true interests ... All the difficulty will be in the first two or three days; after which the reformation will be as natural and easy as the present irregularity. ... Oblige a man to rise at four in the morning, and it is probable he will go willingly to bed at eight in the evening."

(See Daylight Saving Time Web Exhibits for more about Franklin's ingenious plan.)

So I suppose we should count our blessings. Awakening to the sounds of small children at 5:45am seems much more pleasant than being aroused by church bells and booming cannons at 4:00 in the morning. But still, I dread the next few days of early mornings and cranky kids. I think we'll take old Ben's advice and go to bed early tonight.