Daylight Pillaging

Well.
If you are reading this tonight, finish quickly and then go immediately to bed. You are in for a rude shock when that alarm goes off on your Sunday morning. Because it’s THAT night of the year. The night the Daylight Gremlin comes and steals the hour it has no right to touch.  All day I have been strategically planning for this. OK, if we eat breakfast and are done by 8:20, lunch at 11:36, dinner at 5…then 5 will be the new 6. We can throw the kids into the bath at 6:20. They can each have 4 minutes in the bath, which brings us to 6:36. Brush, jammy up, launch into bed, fall asleep immediately, and maybe we won’t have any melt downs tomorrow. As if. My plan mostly worked. It would have gone slightly better if SnuggleMonkey hadn’t scraped both knees today, causing her to walk like Baby Frankenstein throughout all of my evening instructions. That added at least 6 minutes to my process. By 8 NEW TIME, Beloved was out. The boys were out by 8:30 new time. And SnuggleMonkey was confined. That’s all I can say about her.

I predict a disaster. For 9 years, I have carefully written out a Daylight Savings Time Transition Planning document. It is foolproof and scientific. I have followed it painstakingly and tweaked it each year to utter perfection. And yet, each year, there is a screeching wreck that occurs the following morning between attitudes, and opinions, and the darkness that should not be. And so…though I have carried out this plan perfectly…a morning disaster awaits me. Only morning can tell on this one.

Pasted in below was my journal entry from last year’s Daylight Savings deal. I wrote it up on a Sunday morning.

What are we saving here? Daylight? Did we save it? No, we stole it from morning, when PEOPLE NEED TO BE AWAKE. So it will now be light when I want them asleep at night and dark when they are forced shockingly awake. It is now 7:18 on Sunday morning and every person is asleep. I find this silly. For the non-church going world, they are loving it. Sleeping in. It’s paradise for them. For the church-going world, why can we not start these ventures on Friday night? I want to propose that all future ridiculous Daylight Stealings start on Friday nights, so that at least I can roll over and go back to sleep in the dark on a Saturday.

One year later, I stand by this emotion. To ease the pain of even the thought of a lost hour, I am going to stare at this photo of a tiny Beloved. It will stop the crying of my tired soul…