Daylight What?

Surely I am not the only parent who loathes Daylight Saving Time.

I can't even remember if we're "on" or "off" of Daylight Saving Time. Does it actually save daylight? Does it really matter if in the winter the sun comes up an hour earlier? It's still dark when you go to work whether the sun comes up at 7:30 or at 8:30! I just really don't get it. I like the longer days that come with summer, I really do. I like the sun not coming up at oh-dark-thirty. But the confusion that amasses...oh, the confusion.


Sunset as seen from our living room window.

First off, there's Fall Back (I don't know if Fall Back is going on to or off of Daylight Saving Time). To combat Fall Back we very gradually moved Lane's nap and bedtimes later by five minutes each day for about two weeks, so by the time Fall Back Day came, she went to bed at her normal time and woke up at her normal time, so she didn't wake up an hour early. It worked pretty well, I suppose.

But now it's Spring Forward. And I have a toddler who's eating real meals and snacks and is only taking one nap a day. She's been waking up in the 6 o'clock hour for the past couple of weeks and ready for her nap by 10:30 or 11:00. We've been eating meals ridiculously early for the past week, lunch at 10:45 some days and dinner before 5:00, because Lane's been waking up so early that it throws our whole day off. I decided to embrace it a couple of days ago so that when tomorrow comes, our schedule will be normal and we'll be getting hungry at "normal" times and Lane will be ready for her nap at noon or 12:30. I will be glad when the sun comes up later.

Europe/Asia does Daylight Saving Time at a different time than the U.S. does it, a week later for Fall Back and two weeks later for Spring Forward. So when normally my mom in Alaska is 11 hours back, for the past two weeks she's only been 10 hours back. And then there are the states that don't do Daylight Saving Time at all, and if you need to call someone in one of those, you're never sure what time it is. Then there are individual countries (ahem, like TURKEY) that decide they don't want to do Daylight Saving Time on the same day as all the other countries in the area, so they choose to do it a day late (and a dollar short?). Apparently university entrance exams were scheduled for today and they didn't want students to miss out on their extra hour of sleep last night (so instead they're going to make all "real" workers miss out on their extra hour of sleep tonight). So we do Daylight Saving Time tonight at 3:00 a.m. Can you imagine the mess at airports? Today, for one day only, Turkey was on the same time as the majority of Europe. Tomorrow we'll be back to being an hour ahead.

Seriously, why can't the clocks just stay as they are? Why can't we stay on Spring Forward Time? Nobody really cares if the sun comes up earlier in the winter: we all would rather have that hour of daylight in the afternoon, not in the morning. It's not helping anyone get out of bed any earlier! And it's screwing my kid's sleeping schedule up. It's one big mess, I tell you, one big mess. And I don't like it one bit.

***Did you know that it's Daylight Saving Time, not Daylight Savings Time? 'Fess up...who's been saying it wrong? ***