Time Change

I have located perhaps the lone benefit to having a baby who refuses to maintain any sort of routine: spring forward day means nothing to my family. For the first time in my life, I remain completely unaffected by the change to daylight saving time. Am I tired today? Of course! But that's because I was up every 3 hours overnight, same as I've been every night for the past ten.

The "good" thing about Miles is that he doesn't give a crap what time it is or what is on schedule for the day. If he's tired, he wants to be asleep and if he is not tired, by God--he will be awake. He has no regard for weekend vs week day, company vs just family, time to watch Lost vs sing Music Together songs. Every few hours, that boy will be awake and then, once he has licked everything in the room, pooped, and jumped around for awhile, he will become asleep.

Most days, I find it very difficult to surrender to the unschedulability of this life. I find I can accomplish things, like going to the store or cleaning the bathtub, only when they are not attached to specific time frames. As soon as any sort of deadline or coordination is involved, forget about it. There is an equal chance I can be available or that I'll be counting to ten in the hallway before I try to nurse the crying baby to sleep for the fourth time that hour.

This represents such an utter and complete reversal of the life I once knew, where I could map out a day coordinated to the very minute, with things like "relax" and "eat cereal" penciled into the agenda at set times. I have had to change my way of thinking to focus on specific objectives, prioritized by importance, rather than view my day as chopped into specific slots. Heck, I used to mentally prepare for an entire week as a unit. Now, I can't do that any more and I'm learning to let go of the urge to try.

It's strange, though, that as we approached this clock changing weekend I realized time matters not one lick. It's totally arbitrary. Do you know how trippy that is for me? Yesterday, Corey and I just went about our day, went to bed as soon as Miles did, and knew he would wake up when he woke up. Our Sunday would be what it was going to be. It was strangely calming to just be in the moment because there was no alternative. It's hard to explain, but evening became just evening time, rather than the set of hours between 6pm and our 9pm bedtime...

For most of my life, I have dreaded daylight saving day because it meant I lost an hour of sleep. I'd inevitably have to be up for work or errand-running or have been out late the night before (or maybe I spent the evening before mentally reciting my schedule for the next week to make sure I hadn't left a single moment unaccounted for). I can't get over the fact that this year was so different.

Want to know when MW was up for the day today? 8:30am EDT. Want to know why that doesn't matter? Because he was also up from 12:00am-1:00am and 4:30-5:30, snotting and coughing and generally breaking my heart with his little chest cold.

Everyone assures me that I will be able to rejoin the world that rotates around a clock, one day be able to again say, "Sure! Let's have lunch at 12:30!" Today is the first day in a long time where I don't care--maybe my rigidly scheduled life wasn't that great anyway. It was like this shattering, delirious revelation. We'll eat when we're hungry, sleep when the baby sleeps, and spend the time in between doing what we need to get done.

In this case, what we need to get done is a top-to-bottom scrub of our snot-covered germ den, but that's a story for another day.