About Distracted Daddy
Distracted Daddy is a working father with a two-year-old daughter, a focused wife and a flatulent pug. When he’s not distracted he blogs about poop, parenting and other things at distracteddaddy.com.
Losing Daylight
the fatherlode: daylight savings time canada
(Mar.17.11)
Parenting holds its fair share of surprises. Even if you’ve read all of the What to Expect When You Don’t Know What to Expect Even Though You’re Expecting a Baby Unexpectedly books, you aren’t prepared for everything.
Daylight Savings Time is one of those surprises. It seems innocent enough: twice a year we adjust our clocks, springing forward or falling back.
It’s supposed to help us save energy or encourage shopping or control the vampire population or something equally ludicrous. There are no studies backing any of this up. It’s so arbitrary that changing its occurrence is one of the few accomplishments of George W. Bush’s presidency.
In Saskatchewan, Arizona and most of the world, they don’t follow daylight savings time. They don’t change their clocks because it interferes with farming. Cattle won’t adjust their daily grazing/sleeping while standing/chewing schedule to follow an arbitrary adjusted edict.
Neither will toddlers.
Four months ago, daylight savings time ruined our weekend. Like most toddlers our daughter is on a very fixed schedule. Her sleep schedule is like the final minutes of Jenga game — precariously teetering on the brink of doom.
That Sunday morning when we were supposed to leisurely fall back into an extra hour of sleep, our Jenga tower collapsed. Our daughter woke up early, earlier than normal. And then we adjusted the clocks. Daylight Savings Time may as well have slapped me in the face.
My daughter normally wakes up at 7am, but she woke up at 6am, and thanks to DST it was actually 5am. I was awake and entertaining a toddler at 5am on a Sunday!
And she wasn’t in a good mood. Her sleep schedule was thrown off like there was an anomaly in the space-time continuum. It was like I was parenting in a dystopian reality that wasn’t supposed to exist. Afternoon naps were ignored. There were tantrums left, right, and center. Bedtimes happened earlier. If only I had a Delorean/mystical British phone booth/hot tub time machine.
It took days for her sleep schedule to recover.
Fast forward to this past weekend, it was time to spring forward. Instead of gaining an hour, we were about to lose an hour. Daylight savings time was no longer a surprise.
What was a surprise was the gastrointestinal virus that hit my wife and me on Saturday night. It was a gift from daycare via our viral toddler. So not only did we lose an hour, we lost our lunch. Repeatedly.
Thankfully our daughter didn’t seem to mind missing that hour. And we were too occupied to notice.
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