“Spring Forward” is Way Better than “Fall Back”

Before I had kids, I loved the “fall back” time change, and hated “spring forward.” I don’t know why really. People always talk about “getting another hour of sleep” in the fall and “losing an hour” in the spring. Which I guess is true if you have to get up for some reason on the Sunday morning following the change, but I rarely did. Actually, the time change hardly ever affected my sleep. Sure, I might have thought, on Saturday night in the spring, “Ugh, it was 1:59 and now it’s 3 am. I guess I’d better get to bed.” It might have been a bummer to wake up at 11, only to find that it was actually noon. But since I pretty much never had anywhere to be on Sunday mornings, I didn’t ever give up an hour of sleep. Oh heck no. I just lost an hour of day. But, I still preferred “fall back,” when I could wake up at 11am and find that it was actually 10!! I had another whole hour to watch Golden Girls and work on my dissertation, or whatever I used to do on weekends.

Now that I have kids, I’d really rather that we never had to go through this silly time change thing. Really.

But, since we must still change the clocks twice a year, I’ve learned that now I much prefer to “spring forward.” Now that I do have a reason to get up on Sunday mornings (three cute little reasons, in fact, who insist on waking up early in spite of my attempts to get them to understand that Mommy really loves to sleep in). In the fall, on that Sunday after the time change, my little darlings still wake up at 6am or so. Only it’s actually 5. And that Sunday after the “fall back” time change? It is the longest. day. ever.

But yesterday was a breeze. When Sis woke me up at 6, it was actually 7. And by the time her sisters were up and breakfast was done, the morning was half over. The day flew by! And a little extra bonus? All of my children slept past 7am today. Even this little one:

At some point, I’m sure they’ll adjust to this change in the clock and go back to waking at 6. But 7 was nice this morning.

And “springing forward” comes with all sorts of other nice things. Like above freezing temperatures and three days of rain that have begun to (barely) melt the mountains of snow we have.

Like St. Patricks Day fun. We made our annual yogurt covered pretzels shaped like shamrocks the other day. They were for a play date with our friends, and Miss worked really hard on them, making special ones for each of her friends who were coming over. Unfortunately our friends were sick, so we didn’t get to share with them. I was sad that we couldn’t have our play date, but on the bright side, that meant more treats for me. I mean us.

I bought some green peppers to do what I thought would be a totally awesome St. Patty’s Day craft with the girls. I made sure each of the peppers had three lobes, cut off the tops, put out green and white paint and green and white paper, and showed the girls how to make shamrocks using the peppers as stamps. They started to do the stamps, but as soon as I got out the little paintbrushes so they could paint stems, the stamping idea went right out the window. So they just painted.

Lass painted the peppers…

Oh well. We do have several lovely green and white paintings.

Before the rain came we got some time playing in the snow in the relatively warm weather on Friday.

At least we started out playing in the snow. The girls thought the snow was great at first, but as soon as they found the puddles on the driveway, they didn’t care one bit about the snow anymore.

I am so ready for spring.