More Sleep?

It used to be that I would look forward to daylight savings time either for the extra hour of sleep or the extra hour of work. Either way, the following morning was just a little bit better. This year, things are a little different. While the potential is still there for an extra hour of sleep it was really more like an extra hour to stay up and get work done. And the morning presented a new slate of issues.

A few weeks back, each of us needing a bit of a respite on the weekends, my wife and I each took a day to sleep in. After a long work week, I preferred to take Saturday morning to remain in bed until 10 while my wife took Sunday to get a little extra rest before the week got started. It is a system that should work well but there are a few hiccups along the way a big one happening this morning.

Our son has been having a few issues sleeping during the week which makes him a little extra tired over the weekend. Of course, it doesn’t help that he insists on getting up at the same time each morning no matter what time he fell asleep or if he stayed unconscious during the night. Needless to say, there were a few rough nights leading up to daylight saving time and even though the dial on my watch may have moved back, the timer in our son’s head didn’t get the memo.

By the time I got him out of bed he seemed a bit out of sorts. It may have only been an hour to many but it made a huge difference to us as we were woken up at the old time. While I always enjoyed the extra hour of rest before, I never truly appreciated that hour until this year. That is a long hour when the bonus time was used to stay awake the night before. Turns out, that wasn’t the smartest thing to do.

Of course, the true impact of the time change didn’t really hit our son until this evening when what he thought was bed time was approaching… after all the windows had been dark for a while so it must be time to sleep. That was the longest hour of the day. But there were some lessons learned and mental notes taken for next year. Maybe the same mistakes won’t happen again when we adjust the clocks in the spring.  

So Long Precious Hour Of Sleep

This weekend our alarms went off a little sooner, our eyes were a little heavier, and our son woke up a little later. The last one was welcomed but the first two we could have done without. With all the changes that have happened recently, daylight saving time was more of a shock to the system than it had been in the past.

One thing that has become precious to us (in addition to our son) is sleep. It is something that we enjoy while it lasts and are still not getting enough of which is why we have been dreading this weekend for months. A single hour may not seem like much to some, there is a good article in Time Magazine about the minimal impact of this time shift, but for us it makes a huge difference in our own sleep pattern and our son’s schedule. With that said, it is nice to wake up to a room filled with sunlight and hopefully the loss of time will mean the rapid arrival of warm weather and a release from the four walls of which we have grown rather tired.

While the momentary loss of sleep is something that we are not fond of, the approach of spring is something that we are both looking forward to. The weather combined with the birth of our son has kept us confined to our house more than usual this year and the ability to go outside and simply walk is something for which we have been longing. Not to mention that the bitter frigidity of the winter has wreaked havoc on the temperature inside our home. And this last note was really the driving force behind the adoption of daylight saving time.

While Ben Franklin is commonly considered the first to propose such an adjustment, the recent history of the adoption has a similar rational. Franklin’s proposal as well as the modern ones were a means of saving energy… candles in the beginning and fuel as the most recent rational. A more detailed look into the modern history can be found on Wikipedia. If you are interested in acquiring some more random knowledge (just in case you are even on Jeopardy) it is definitely worth reading.

So, what it comes down to is that in an effort to save some energy we are going to lose some energy for a day or two. Sometimes that seems like a fair trade but that has to be reserved to hindsight. However, having seen our recent PECO bills this winter I think I am okay with that even if we are a little grumpier than usual this weekend.

An Extra Hour

I'm starting this post in a random fashion by giving you the bird!

It may not be much to some and, in fact, it may be a hassle to others but having an extra hour this weekend has been a welcomed occurrence. Last year it was also a beneficial evening for a different reason as it meant an hour of overtime but this year it was simply a time for me to rest and the ability to get up an extra hour earlier this weekend.  Falling back was a means to fall back into a routine after a long and hectic week that had my body and mind divided between two completely different time zones.

However, weekends like this one can sometimes be the least productive times for me. After a particularly eventful week I am ready to just do nothing during my two day recuperation and that was exactly the rut that I fell into. I even put off writing this post until the very end of the day in the hope that I would turn the corner and get something done. But that was not happening and this weekend passed with only a short daytrip and a few blog posts written as the only things that were accomplished before a week that will consist mostly of making up for last week.

Even with an extra hour I still find myself asking where the day has gone. It seems like the hours, days, weeks, months seem to be going by so quickly that I am unable to keep up with them. Time and again I have to look at the calendar to make sure that it really is the day that I think it is or, as was the case a few days ago, that it really is November. Today, for instance, I found myself floored by the fact that I have been at my new job for just over a month now.

One more hour really doesn’t seem like much and over the course of the year it isn’t but for one day it allows us to fill that extra hour with whatever we want to do. Some of us sleep, some of us work, and some of us take the time to allow our minds to reset. Sometimes it is even a collection of all three. But this extra hour, like all hours, should not be taken for granted or forgotten. We may lose track of time but the memories and accomplishments contained in those minutes are what continues to reinvent our present. Today we got an hour of reinvention.