Daylight Savings Time

Most of the United States "fell back" this weekend, early this morning actually. Conventional wisdom says that we should be grateful for this artificial time change because it comes with this amazing bonus gift of extra time - a whole hour to be exact!

But I take issue with conventional wisdom (and the obviously childless legislators that brought this whole scheme to us in the first place).

My gripe is as follows:

Who needs an extra hour at 2 a.m. on a Sunday?
I need an extra hour on Tuesday morning at 7:15 - when I am trying to make ghost shaped pancakes for the sixth morning in a row, while looking for one left gym shoe with Velcro closures and special mittens that have glove fingers and a flip top mitten cover (they’re called "glomits"), and making two completely different lunches.

And I need an extra hour again at 2:45 pm, simply to forestall the ending of the school day and the necessary retrieval of two very tired, very hungry, and very needy children, who require snacks, bathrooms, and general attention at the same moment that their toddler sister falls asleep in the car seat, covered in apple juice and chocolate chunks (one would think it would be pretty hard to fall asleep sitting up all hopped up on natural and artificial sweeteners, but apparently it can be done!)

I don’t need an extra hour at 5:45 pm on Sunday evening, after the children have been fed (because children, like senior citizens, must eat at the same time every day no matter what the clock says) and long after they have used up their allotted daily TV time. And I don’t need that hour because the crushing weight of that extra hour and our collective need to fill it can lead to desperate measures like a family game of Chutes and Ladders, which can take much more than an hour to complete - especially when playing with a habitual cheater and a third grader who thinks its utterly hilarious to do one good deed (help an injured dog) and then immediately follow it by eating an entire plate of cookies, throwing up and then reading a comic book during history class.

What’s more, I absolutely do not need an extra hour at 7:45 pm on Sunday night. Especially, when that extra hour perverts what just last night was a glorious fifteen minutes until bedtime and stretches it into an almost unbearable hour and fifteen minutes until bedtime.

I think that if the government is going to impose this extra hour on me, especially if its going to be on the same weekend as Halloween - a night in which all of the carefully planned rules and routines of every household are handily discarded in favor of candy, children running through the neighborhoods in the dark and talking to each and every stranger they encounter - then the architects of "daylight savings time" should offer this package deal to America’s parents: included with the requisite extra hour should be a bottle of wine and a magic pill that makes children happily bathe themselves and quickly tuck themselves into their beds - silently.