Fall Back, Go Away!

You all know the drill, we change our clocks back in the fall and everyone rejoices over the “extra” hour, but I’m here to tell you, as a parent with young children, there is no “extra” hour for you!! I said what I said.

Why am I taking such a strong stance on this? Why do I loathe the “fall back” time change so much? Well, if you have children like mine who are early risers, then your usual 5:30 a.m. wake-up becomes 4:30 a.m. And I’m not talking, oh, we wake up and just lay around and relax — I’m talking, we wake up and we are ON and POPPING and ready to go. We’re ready to go to the beach, we’re ready to go to the marina and catch some blue crabs, we’re ready to wrestle, we’re ready to play loud musical instruments all before the sun comes up, and no, keeping them up later does not work. It just makes them grumpier!

Not to mention the other end of this, which is that it gets dark at what I swear feels like 2:30 p.m.

Do I go home and go to bed when it gets dark? I don’t know what to do with myself. I feel like I need to go to bed since it’s so dark and then I look at the clock and it’s only 6 p.m. I swear it feels like midnight. 

You can’t really go to any parks and burn off some steam, can’t skate in the dark very well, and it’s not very fun to take neighborhood walks when you feel like you might get attacked by the spooky creatures of the forest night.

Lunchtime becomes 9 a.m. because you’ve already been up for what feels like 55 hours, and my absolute favorite is that “extra” hour that I waited to go in to work is now spent staying an “extra” hour at the office, and then it’s already getting dark!!

Then the ultimate torture that we endure is when we spring FORWARD and all spend the next two weeks adjusting to the exhausting fact that we lost an hour! At least with spring forward you get more daylight to frolic and play and it doesn’t feel like midnight at 2 p.m.

I want to like “falling back,” I really do. The thought of cozy snuggly evenings relaxing and watching all the fun fall TV, the backyard fires that get started earlier, the flames dancing away under the stars putting on their fiery show, the crisp quiet nights where the moon shines extra bright, see — I really do try to hype myself up for falling back, but I just can’t get jiggy with it. I love all of the fall things, just not falling back!

READ: Just Trying to Be a Basic Fall B in Florida

I know this all sounds very dramatic, but I promise you I will spend the next few months griping and moaning and groaning about the time change, my friends can absolutely attest to this, we even debate which is better, springing forward or falling back, and never have we ever convinced the other to change their minds on which they like more. I think the preference is built into our DNA and can never be altered! I suppose you always need a yin to a yang.

My soul will be in a funk until I see that tiny sliver of oh-so-slight daylight creeping in sometime in mid-January where there is a literal light at the end of this daylight-saving time tunnel!

Then it’s working its way back to the ultimate celebration of spring flowers, warmer water temperatures, and longer daylight evening hours! HURRAY!

For those who do love the fall back and do believe in the extra hour, I really do want to like it — I just think until my kids get a bit older I will be up with the chickens year-round and will never feel like I gained an extra hour. By the time they are teenagers and want to sleep in is when I will plot my revenge and wake them up at 4:30 am.

To end my rant about the upcoming time change, let me just say that Hawaii and Arizona got it right; they don’t fall back or spring forward at all. Let’s all get on board with them and do away with the time change and let the Earth and Sun do their thing. We can all still howl at the moon and frolic in the daylight during the seasons, it just won’t be so abrupt, it will be smooth and subtle… just like Mother Nature.