day two of daylight savings time, and we’re not faring so well.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1eLK2OlF6wsomehow, explaining daylight savings time to my two kids makes me feel like i’m trying to sell them sort of evil bill of goods. i mention how ben franklin was behind this — how bad could it be? i mean, this is mr. $50 bill you know, the inventor of:
lightning rods, glass armonica (a glass instrument, not to be confused with the metal harmonica), Franklin stove, bifocal glasses and the flexible urinary catheter.
(any guy behind the flexible urinary catheter can’t be all bad, right?)
well, old ben also devised the whole pay it forward phenomenon, too. so truly, how evil could this guy be?
according to my two kids, extremely.
two days in a row, getting people out of bed in time for school has been akin to asking them to walk across hot coals to a dinner of raw bear brains. they cannot fall asleep at night; they cannot wake up in the morning. it’s quite simple. and all the sleepytime tea in the world cannot change that.
but we do this for farmers — it gives them more sunlight to get things done, i might cheerfully remind them at some moment when they aren’t contemplating whether one pillow or two thrown directly at my head would get me to stop talking.
i guess farming doesn’t happen in our little exurb of washington, dc. at least, no one plans to plow at our house any time soon.
this seems to be the first time that daylight savings has hit these two kids quite so hard. part of me trembles, thinking how this might be shades of teenaged moments to come in the not-too-distant future. i used to bitch that my kids never slept.
now, i bitch that they won’t wake up.
I think daylight-saving time is less for farmers (who, after all, will get up before dawn no matter what time we say it is) than for those city slicker businesses, schools and the like, who have to pay for the electricity to keep the lights on while people work, as well as (according to wikipedia) increasing the time daylight is available for afternoon leisure time.
Fortunately for us, we made the transition fairly painlessly. Some mild complaints that it was still dark at 7am on Monday morning, but they seem to have shifted the hour with no ill effects. Yay us!
lucky ducks!
and hell. i just thought hard-working farmers sounded romantic. thought it would be inspirational for the kids. not so.