posts tagged with 'time'
I feel this way every fall
We're having trouble getting up in the morning these days. It's dark. Daylight Savings time doesn't end until a week from Sunday, and I can't wait; I'm so glad the permanent DST revolution didn't pass. I would like to say more about the whole subject, but I find that I've already said it all. I just have to repeat myself because it's still terrible!
we need a time change
It's been so hard for us to get going in the mornings lately! We're all early risers (well, mostly all) but once risen we also have to make a start on the work of the day, especially when we need to leave the house by 8:30. Who can be bustling around getting ready when it's still dark out?! Well, lots of people apparently: everyone with school or jobs out of the house lately, and everyone on the other side of the time zone. But we're not used to it, and it feels pretty challenging. We're all looking forward to some morning sun Sunday morning!
falling dark
A few days ago I came to a stopping place in the chapter book we're reading in the evenings (Julie of the Wolves, in case you were wondering) and looked up in complete surprise at how dark it was. "Yikes!" I said. "It must be late! We should be in bed!" I was even more surprised when the boys, who had a better angle on the clock, told me it was just ten past seven. Never mind: it had been a very busy day, so we were happy to sleep when the sun told us to. But it was startling to realize just how fast the days are shortening lately, here in the moment of the fastest shortening of the year. It's not something I really keep track of, but it feels like not much more than a week ago we could have been reading outside well past 7:00! (it was also warmer then; the past few evenings have been pretty chilly).
Yesterday we had another lesson in what fall evenings mean when we took a walk to work off the big heavy supper that I made (chicken! biscuits! mashed potatoes and gravy!). We headed out before 6:30 for a little loop in our local woods, but before we were even half way through it was clear that we should have brought lights. Thankfully we know the path very well indeed so we weren't too bothered, but it was a little stressful for the half of the party who were without shoes and had to contend with stubbing their toes on roots. We have an outdoor gathering a our friends' house this evening; it feels like it'll be getting dark before we even leave the house! Happy October; fall is here.
is it my bedtime?
One minor benefit of blogging regularly for so many years is that it lets me see how well I've been managing my sleep schedule. Writing is often the very last thing I do in a day, so by checking the date posts are published I can see how long I've been keeping myself up. And it's been pretty late the last couple weeks! There are good reasons to stay up late—it's the only time I get a moment to myself, a moment to think without being assailed by the constant noise of our lovely household—but overall I think I'm better when I manage to retire at a reasonable hour. When I'm up til all hours I'm tired the next day, and then things don't go well and I get frustrated, and then I need even more time the following evening to calm down and collect myself. A vicious cycle.
Even worse, I don't even get to share the evening time with the one member of the family I'd actually like to hang out with by that point. Leah needs to go to bed early; most nights she barely manages to stay awake longer than the kids (in fact, often she doesn't even do that!). So really, I ought to go to bed early and get my quiet alone time in the morning when I'm not collapsing from tiredness. I'm going to try it... keep an eye on those post times if you want to know how I'm doing!
dark days
We've got lots going on these days, so we need to get up in time to get the day started. Unfortunately the never-ending reign of Daylight Savings Time makes that hard. What do you call it savings if you have to turn the lights on if you want to get up before 6:30 in the morning?! The real problem is that I don't like to turn lights on in the morning; it throws off my waking up process. Or so I say; maybe it's just hard for me to get up in the dark, which I imagine is quite natural. I'm sure that that putting lights on after sunset throws off my going to bed process, but, as I say, we've got lots going on, and we need to add some light somewhere! But I'm very much looking forward to the time change in a couple weeks.
writing and sleeping
I've been staying up late the last few days or weeks. There's so much lovely stuff to do around here—playing, building, cooking—that it's hard to sit down to the computer to write until everyone else has gone to sleep (also it's hard for me to concentrate before everyone else has gone to sleep!). I have no illusions that posting in this blog is something I need to do, but I do enjoy having it as a record; and when I don't write in it for a length of time I have trouble getting started again. Plus I committed to doing this poetry thing, which I'm pretty happy with—but I haven't managed to get much ahead what I need to have done for each new day. And then of course I have a real job that I need to write for. But as I talked to Leah about it she recommended writing in the morning, so I went to bed at a reasonable hour last night... and woke up after six hours of sleep before 4:00, raring to go! Oh well. Rescheduling myself will take a little time.
unschooling children know no schedule
After a very busy day at our house, in which we hosted a segment of our new co-op for wreath making (11 kids in all), I was ready to go to sleep right after supper. To be honest, I was ready to go to sleep not to long after lunch, but it didn't seem appropriate to just abandon guests and children and retire to the bedroom, so I kept myself going. And then I kept myself going some more after supper, because the younger boys finally started writing.
Now, when I say writing I don't mean they were actually putting letters on paper themselves. Lijah can't really, yet—or at least you don't want him to, since it's tiring to not only tell him how to spell a word, very slowly, but also draw each letter in the air so he knows how to make it. And Zion's writing genius was stifled by my early attempts to make him write down his own stories. That was a mistake.
Happily, Lijah is unendingly creative; and having learned better, I now just do my best to capture his stories as they emerge and get them down on paper for him. It turns out that when I do it creates a positive feedback loop: he's tickled to hear his own stories and wants to make more of them. Mostly so far he's just done one page and moved on, but this evening he was inspired by Harvey's working on a comic strip (at the dinner table, but whatever) to string together eight pages of material featuring Thor, the devil, Wiley Coyote, Nuliujuk, and more. Not to be outdone, Zion created his own eight-page book. More coherent, if less wildly original, it's a story about a meteor crashing to earth and releasing a cloud of battling Pokemon.
All this creativity took place between 6:30 and 7:45, which may be early evening for some people but is definitely the center of the bedtime hour for us. So that was delayed. Worse, writing time also kept anyone from doing their kitchen chores, so after I got everyone tucked in bed at around 8:30—Leah is out for the evening—I had to come down and start the dishes. But I think it was worth it. Stories are important. I can't wait to see what they think of next.
time to sleep
It is hard sometimes to find time to write. The time that I usually manage it is after the kids go to bed; the problem with that, though, is that after I finish bedtime I need a good long time to decompress from the busyness of the day and concentrate on producing readable English prose (and Lord knows I don't always hit the mark even then). So of course my own bedtime is delayed, sometimes past 11:00.
Which 11:00 may be a perfectly reasonable bedtime for some adults! I've heard that there are sometimes things showing on the television—dramatic events, sporting contests—that will keep viewers up at least that long. But I don't think it works for me in the long run. My average day takes a considerable amount of emotional energy and improvisational thinking, and I need my sleep. So I have a new regime, and no more late-night writing.
Except for Zion, we're all pretty much early risers in this household. This morning Leah was up first and out for a run at 6:00. Harvey got up a few minutes ago and is now reading out on the front porch using a headlamp. Lijah is eating his pre-breakfast muffins on the couch. Can I do the day's writing work before the sun rises and I need to start getting breakfast ready? Only time will tell. But it should certainly be easier after 8+ hours of sleep a night, for a change.
so dark!
Day length changes quick this time of year! Just last week were celebrating the equinox, and still feeling pretty summery; now we find it's still pitch dark at six in the morning. That's tough! Unlike most everyone around us, though, we don't mind so much the earlier sunsets. As a family of morning people, we tend to be winding down after dinner—or even before dinner!—anyways, so it's nice when the sky agrees with us.
Unlike a lot of Americans, I don't object to winter to the point of Seasonal Affective Disorder or anything like that. We don't have it that bad here in New England—there's not a lot of talk about SAD in Spain, I don't think, despite their sharing a latitude with us. We just happen to have some darkness and some snow, and I guess that's enough to get folks down. If you ask me, though, we most of us are sleep deprived all the time; maybe the shortening days can be a helpful hint to get to bed a little earlier! I imagine how cozy things must have been before electric lights and capitalism, when at midwinter there was nothing to do but sleep or sit around telling stories. Assuming you weren't starving to death, of course—first-world modernity does have some benefits.
I think the real problem people have with SAD may be because they have to work indoors all day. It's super hard to get up in the dark to go in to work, sit all day under florescent lights, and then come home in the dark. The natural world is telling them to go to bed, but that would mean a day of doing nothing but meaningless alienated labor. Like in this AskMe question. But if you ask me the answer isn't to stay up late and wake up with the help of fancy light alarms, it's to quit your job and become a hobo who sleeps and rises with the natural rhythm of the sun. Though I understand that doesn't work for everyone.
Ahem. All that is to say, I certainly agree that dark mornings make it much harder to wake up. I'm so glad we live on the eastern edge of our time zone! And I'm one of the few people to welcome the arrival of standard time, when it finally rolls around after Halloween. Until they get rid of entirely, which I imagine is only a matter of time. Oh well, by then I'll be a hobo myself so it won't bother me at all.
ways in which times are changing, other ways they are not
Yeah, we had another storm yesterday. Winter holds us in its grip. And its grip feels particularly strong and fierce this evening, with all the snow that fell yesterday compressed into maybe five inches of icy cement, and giant solid snowballs lining the street. We're kind of over it; the boys declined to go sledding today. In their defense, they did play outside for a fair bit yesterday, despite the driving wind and icy snow-rain mix that fell all afternoon. Zion even helped shovel.
digging out
But we don't even care about that, because we're enjoying the time change. Yes, you heard correctly; I've complained about losing our morning light before, vociferously in person and a little more mildly in these pages, but actually this year it's gone pretty well. We've managed to adjust bedtime to the new time almost instantly, and mornings are later but still relaxed. Most importantly for me, I'm getting up before the hens again! (long may it last).
This evening saw the boys outside to play after dinner for the first time this year. "Feel like" 15°F, but there was still sunlight so they they were. I think going out late put Zion in summer mode; his friends were wearing snow suits but all he managed was a sweatshirt. (Or maybe he just couldn't find his coat. That happens a lot these days.)
Judging by the forecast winter is going to stick around for a little while yet—that groundhog knew what she was talking about. But we know it can't last for ever, and all that hot sunlight coming through the skylight will be just the thing for starting seeds in a couple days.
So it's too bad that everyone else is finally starting to come around to my formerly grumpy view of time changes. We've had two great ones in a row, so now I'm happy enough to stick with the current system. But we're flexible; if you want to change it, that's cool too.