Monday, March 9, 2009

Why I Hate Daylight Savings Time


It's the first monday of daylight savings time. I'm sitting here at the computer trying hard to focus my thoughts on three hours of sleep. This is the third week of no coffee and herbal tea just ain't cutting through the haze of sleepiness. Queen Teen is watching a movie on her bed, unable to get to school due to a sleepless night. She was so tired this morning all she could do was cry. All of this sleepy misery is due to one so called money saving idea that plagues all parents with cranky children and insomnia: daylight savings time.

Supposedly daylight savings saves us money. With more day light hours during the time of day when we're home from work, we shouldn't have to use so much electricity, thereby saving several hundred dollars a year. Yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever. I don't know a single parent on the planet who wouldn't gladly give up those hundreds of dollars for that one hour of sleep back.

Or how about we just keep the clock right here and stop messing around with adding and subtracting an hour two times a year? If this is the optimum number of daylight hours for savings, then keep us on daylight savings forever.

Queen Teen's bus arrives at 6:50 am, which means she has to be out of bed by 5:30 am. With daylight savings, her body thinks it's 4:30 am, so of course she couldn't eat breakfast or get out of bed. Last week the sun was rising when she got on the bus. This week it's pitch black out and the sun doesn't rise until the end of first period.

We've gone through this every year since she was born. Toying with her body clock makes her ataxia worse. Worsened ataxia makes it hard for her to sleep, which makes the ataxia worse, which makes sleeping harder... and on and on it goes. By keeping her home today I'm trying to give her sensitive body a chance to catch up with the time change. Perhaps an extra day is all she needs to reset her internal clock.

I really hope so, because I can't do this no sleep thing without a lot of COFFEE.

Maybe we should move to Hawaii. I hear they don't have daylight savings. Neither does Arizona, although Arizona doesn't have a beach.

2 comments:

Princess Abigail said...

Or, you would be very welcome to come to France too, if that tickles your fancy. However, we have the same time changes, and it is VERY annoying ... especially when it means the boys are up and about at a sparrows fart (scuse the Welsh expression) and my body is still in sleep-slumber mode ....

no fun. You're right, Hawai does suddenly sound like THE place to be, doesn't it!

CC said...

As if I need another reason to move to Hawaii!!