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Sunday, April 03, 2005

 

Daylight savings sucks

I've always liked the idea of daylight savings time. In my pre-children life (there was such a thing?) I argued that gaining an hour of daylight for the entire summer was worth the shock of having to get up in the dark again for a while, and losing that hour of sleep. I would have said that if I were able to change anything, it would be nice if we could lose the hour in the middle of the afternoon on Friday while I'm at work, rather than in the middle of the night on a weekend.

This year, I have been nothing short of pathetic in my anticipation of daylight savings time. The boys have been waking up on average around 5:30 am every day, going so far as to wake at 4:30 am (for the day, mind you) two days this week. For weeks, I have had daylight savings day circled on my calendar with stars, happy faces and bouncy trails of Zzzzzzzs painted in the little square. For one magical day, I would be heaved into the day to see a perfectly reasonable 6:00 or 6:15 am on the digital readout of my bedside clock, and I would be satisfied with the sham. For that magical day, I would not glance up at the clock after my fourth cup of coffee, our third viewing of The Knights of Sir Fix-A-Lot, and after chasing Simon out of the cupboards for the ninth time, and weep to see it was not even 7:00 am yet.

Not friggin' likely.

I guess it was partially my own doing. I went out to dinner with some friends last night, and I didn't get home until nearly 11:00 pm. By the time I reset the clocks and crawled into bed, it was already after midnight EDT. But, I remained optimistic that I would get at least 6 hours sleep. Optimism sucks.

4:30 am EDT (that's 3:30 EST, if you've lost track already), Simon wakes crying. I tell him in no uncertain terms that we are NOT getting up. After 20 minutes of rocking, he goes back to sleep.

5:30 am EDT, Tristan wanders in. Too pathetic to protest, I simply open the covers and invite him in. He has had a fever on and off for the last two days, and since our scare with a febrile seizure in December, we don't mess around with fevers. He is hot, and I stagger off in search of some tylenol for him. By the time I crawl back into bed we are both wide awake. After much snuggling, we are both on the cusp of drowsy when...

5:50 am EDT, Simon calls out. He hasn't mastered the words yet, but it is quite clear he is placing his room service order for some lait de mama.

Let me do the math (takes off socks and counts on fingers and toes) - that's 5, maybe 5 and a 1/4 hours sleep in total, give or take. Ugh. Safe to say, the daylight savings renewal plan was a bust. Anybody have any other bright ideas on how to keep a one year old and a three year old from waking at ungodly hours?