Daylight Savings

I have never been very realistic with time. Not even on “fall back” Sunday: that blessed day when you supposedly get an extra hour in your life to do whatever you want with, as though you are in a mini-time machine.

You see, even without that magic hour,  I continue to overestimate what can be done in a day, week, or month…I am like my ten year old son David who, on one particular three day weekend had a 250 page book to read by Monday. The book was discovered on Sunday at noon, on the couch, opened to page 50, by ‘Mitchel the Informer’ who promptly notified me that David was in his room playing with Legos  and not doing what he was supposed to be doing. When he paused, waiting for the satisfaction of my dramatic gasp, he allowed enough verbal space for me to send him to the kitchen to do the dishes.  Informers have too much time on their hands and need to be redirected…

…but I did search out David… “So…how’s the book coming?” I asked him casually. He looked up at me from his deep meditative Lego trance and said with great confidence “Fine, mom, totally got it handled”. Sweet blued eyed David is very sensitive and easily pushed to tears, which does not help with reading, so I gently said “Ummm….you do realize its noon on Sunday and you have 200 pages left to read in your book, right?” He went a little pale and despite my attempt to be gentle with the brutal reality of things, tears started to flow, the joy of Lego world wrecked by me, the fun wrecker. He’d overestimated his ability to do all that could and should be done during a three day weekend. I know just exactly how he felt right then: it was like some kind of time monster came into his world and swallowed up the three days. He felt robbed…

…so it would actually be better if no one told me when the clocks are rolling backwards an hour and I would just wake up like nothing happened…

Actually I personally think it would be better for everyone if we didn’t have clocks at all. Why not just wake up when it’s light and go to bed when it’s dark (though that would pose a problem for those in Alaska or other way north or way south peeps…more than a lot of coffee and/or sleeping pills might be required in those areas, but it would serve them right for living in Timbuktu, which come to find out (upon further investigation, mainly on how to spell the word which is also spelled “Timbuctoo’ and ‘Tombouctou’)  is, in addition to being an expression for a far-away place, an actual city in Africa…who knew!?! Plus, well…we wouldn’t get a whole lot done in the winter…maybe though that is the solution to balancing the Federal Budget…if we all just shut down a little bit during the days with more dark and kind of go into half-way hibernation, maybe we’d all be a little more rested come spring time and get crap done more effectively…but I digress…about a bunch of shit I don’t know enough about to write of…but it IS MY blog, so whatever.

…because last night (Saturday) when Grant reminded me at 11 pm that it was blessed “Fall Back” time again, I felt this rush of euphoria thinking that I would actually accomplish all that could and should be done by Sunday evening and maybe have time for a “want to do” or two…

Day light savings always reminds me of when our first two boys were little. They were old enough to tell time and usually resisted going to bed. Grant and I would, out of pure desperation, occasionally instigate “Operation Daylight Sanity Savings” where one of us would distract the boys with a little outside play while the other one went around and set all the clocks in the house forward an hour or two. They would come inside and we’d be like “Wow! Look at how the time has flown! You were out there FOREVER! You must be SO hungry and TIRED!” We’d feed them dinner at four and put them to bed at six, ignoring their protests that ‘it was still light out’. It totally sucked when the technology of iPods, iPads, iPhones and iAmsmarterthanmyparents wrecked this particular stay sane parenting strategy. We have had to resort to small doses of Nyquil (problem here: CPS frowns upon drugging your children) or sending them to bed as pre-punishment for the bad things that we knew they would eventually do “so why not just get your punishment over with now?” promising to not actually punish them when they actually DO the bad thing (problem here: our younger children have actually kept an accounting ledger, and it seems that a couple of them don’t have to go to bed for a couple of years).      

…and like every year at this time, I felt like the extra hour was going to change EVERYTHING and I started making plans…

• I would get ‘caught up’ on the perpetually ‘growing at the speed of light’ dirty laundry pile by making use of the special time continuum thought up by Ben Franklin (that early to bed, early to rise, wise guy) and made official by President Johnson in the 1960’s (except for the states who don’t feel like going along with the hoax, which really screws things up when you want to talk to someone on the phone who lives in Hawaii but can’t figure out if its 2 am or a more reasonable 3 am there.)
• Since I was suddenly supercharged by the extra hour, I would wait up, poised and ready to argue with the ridiculously smart 17 year old Dillin, who just might try and use the daylight savings gig as a perfectly logical (but still busted) excuse to break curfew for the third time in a row.
• I would do some writing…maybe finish that novel I have been meaning to start…
• Since the use of power tools is frowned upon past 11 pm in our household,  I crossed off of my manic mental list (again): “remodel the bathroom that has had a hole in the shower wall for six years” but did decide that scrubbing out the toilet for the first time in months could be a preemptive move toward the idea of bathroom repair in the near future

…and the list in my mind grew and grew along with naive optimism…and an entire hour passed without any of the above actually happening (I know weird)… and I finally just went to bed (after Dillin arrived home three minutes before his curfew, which was kind of a let-down since I was so prepared to actually WIN an argument without having to resort to head spinning/spit flying tactics, which generally ends the argument but doesn’t actually WIN it)….

…but I did fall asleep thinking, “It’s going to be an awesome Sunday! I will probably wake up at 5 am and it will actually really be 4 am and so I will mentally gain the hour AGAIN, so all is not lost!” But what really happened was I slept in until 9 am (on account of being tired from all that list making) thinking it was really only 8 am, but it turns out it was actually 10 am because the clock in our bedroom thinks it knows stuff, but doesn’t. So really I LOST two hours, technically three if you count the hour of manic list making the previous evening.

And so, here I am at noon on Sunday afternoon, at my laptop (MY own Lego world), still in my pj’s, typing away. Grant just popped his head in my office a few minutes ago and gently said “Ummm…you do realize its noon on Sunday…”