time change

I've never really thought about why we "spring forward" and "fall back". I haven't thought much about a lot of things that we do because we've always just done them. But when you live with a 4, almost 5-year-old, you learn that he wants to know "why" we do everything. And this has created an opportunity for me to learn some new, interesting, and sometimes useless facts. Like for example, when his preschool was closed on Columbus Day, Connor wanted to know why. I told him "because it's Columbus Day" and I said it very matter-of-fact because I grew up not going to school on Columbus Day. Did I ever spend the day wanting to know more about Christopher Columbus? No. But Connor did. When I told him that it was Columbus Day, he wanted to know every possible detail of who this person was, where he was from, what he did, etc. So he and I Googled Christopher Columbus and read all about him for about 15 minutes. Breakfast dishes went on hold and the experience was well worth the little time it took to get him the answers he wanted.

This brings me back to "falling back" as we did last night. I've never liked the time change in the Fall because we lose daylight. After I had kids, I liked it even less because I learned quickly that kids don't get the time change as infants and toddlers. So, their sleep gets messed up and that is never a good thing. But today, when Connor found out that I turned his clock back and he noticed at 4:45 p.m. that it was getting dark, he wanted to know why. So as we did on Columbus Day, we Googled "daylight savings time". All the websites were pretty detailed so I had to get to the point after skimming through paragraph after paragraph, all while he was asking, "What does it say?" and I kept saying, "Hang on, hang on...I'm looking."

If you're interested in the detailed version of why we change the clocks, visit http://www.webexhibits.org/daylightsaving/b.html. Talk about a history lesson! I basically told him that Benjamin Franklin thought of it, that he was a man who thought of a lot of things that would help people and daylight savings time helps save money because you don't have to use as much electricity to light your home (and in Ben's day it was to save on the cost of oil lamps).

I think his questions were answered pretty quickly because he was ready to move on to a computer game in like 2 minutes.