It's About Time

by Cathy

I find this whole Daylight Saving Time concept quite annoying.

I read somewhere that the name itself makes no sense; that it should really be called Daylight Shifting Time. We really don't save daylight; we just shift it from the afternoon to the morning during fall, and vice versa in the spring. Besides, why would we want to save it? For what, a rainy day?

If you read up on DST, you will find that many countries - and even some states within the U.S., do NOT observe it, making it an even more complicated change . We all know that it messes up our sleep cycles and pretty much any other system that depends on time and cycles in our life - travel, meetings, appointments, prescriptions, accounting, etc. The time in my work email system still shows pre-DST - which makes for hairy situations when you're at deadline to receive materials.

But the real victims of this unnecessary time change? PARENTS.

Just when you have your feeding/napping/playtime schedule down with your little one - after working week after tireless week building a system that works for your baby and for yourself - BOOM! Along comes DST and throws a wrench into the whole fragile structure.

If you're not quick to shift everything to match the new time change, things will slowly snowball out of control and before you know it, your baby's naps will be during dinnertime and you'll be up at midnight entertaining a wide-eyed baby as she bops endlessly on the bouncy seat while you watch bleary-eyed and desperate. (This actually happened to me, but I can't exactly say that it was due to DST. It may have been the lack of a  schedule implementation in general. Hey, what can I say? It was my first baby.)

Now that my babies have grown and the shift in time doesn't throw them off as much as when they were little, I find that it throws me off quite a bit. The day of the switch, I left the house knowing the new time and was proud that I had even allotted myself extra time to get Bella to her ballet class. En route, however, Bella had a freakout moment - we hadn't changed the car clock - when she realized that we were ONE HOUR late for her class. This in turn set my mind spinning and for one brief moment, I was believing it. 'How could I be so off?!?! I know what time I left the house.' Logic quickly jumped in to disprove my questioning, and brought my sanity back.

The first full day at work after DST, a fellow employee left one hour early - hat on, bags in tow, coat buckled. I hesitantly waved goodbye, thinking that perhaps she had made plans to leave early. After finishing up on the phone, my boss asked, "Why did Charlene leave early?"

"I don't know," I replied, confused. "I thought she had made an arrangement with you to leave early." Just then we both realized what had happened and walked over to the wall clock near her desk. We burst out laughing and lamented at how confused poor Charlene was. We had forgotten to turn the office wall clock back. Fifteen minutes later, Charlene huffed and puffed back into the office. "I drove halfway home when I realized, 'Where was all the traffic and wondered what time it was!'  We all got a good belly laugh from the whole scenario and I commended her for even returning to work, adding, "I would've just gone with the flow and played dumb." And dumb is just how DST makes you feel at times - especially when you think you've got it all together.

While I like the theory that DST takes advantage of the fact that the sun is out earlier in the mornings, I would appreciate this rationale much more if we actually saw the sun during winter in Chicago. To make an endless, dreary winter even worse, it now gets dark at 4pm - smack dab in the middle of my after work/school shuffling schedule. It's bad enough I have to schlep to all the million different places to run errands and drop off/pick up kids to/from activities, but must I do them in the dark? Isn't it bad enough that it's, oh I don't know, blizzarding, raining and tornadoeing at the same time? It is after all, winter in Chicago.

Let's not mess with time, people. It was meant to be experienced as it was since the dawn of time itself. It's about time we leave it that way.


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