When the Clocks Change

So that extra hour of sleep this weekend… You know, the one you got with the change back to standard time? How was it?  Did you enjoy it?  If you did, don’t tell me about it.  I haven’t benefited from that extra hour of sleep even once in the past six years.

Since my son’s birth, little joys like an extra hour of sleep, even once a year, have become a thing of the past.  The kid wakes up pretty much the same time every morning, regardless of when he goes to bed the night before.  If I put him to bed at 8:30, he’s up by 6:15.  If I keep him up until midnight, he’s still up by 6:15, with the added bonus of grump personality to polish it off.  To remind me that not only was he up until midnight, but so was I.  And that sucks.

This year though, I actually allowed myself to get my hopes up a little.  Snags and his dad were having an Xbox night, and I thought I’d head off to bed early, maybe grab two extra hours of sleep.  It was going to be great.  My husband would put Snags to bed and then he was going to sleep in another room because I was getting up early to go running, and he didn’t want my alarm to wake him.  You know, the way his alarm clock wakes me every.damn.morning. of the week. 

So I went to bed.  And you see where this is going right?  It’s all downhill from where I got my hopes up.  Because an hour later I woke up and needed to go to the bathroom.  I went, then I crawled back in bed, closed my eyes, and the dog started scratching at the bedroom door.  She needed to go outside.  Grudgingly I got up, went downstairs, and let her out.  I climbed the stairs and crawled back in bed.  And that’s exactly when somebody else’s dog, outside somewhere, started barking.  Bark, bark, barking.  So my dog started growling.  Right there, in the middle of my bed, in the dark, she’s lying there growling. Now this this probably only went on for ten minutes, but it felt like hours until I got up and shot both dogs. 

Okay, okay.  I didn’t shoot them (please note, no animals were harmed in the making of this story).  But I did lie there imaging myself calling the police and asking them to troll the neighborhood listening for the barking dog and for them to shoot it to put me out of my misery…

Eventually the outside dog stopped barking and my dog stopped growling in response, and I fell back to sleep.  But then I dreamt about work stuff.  Now dreaming about work generally sucks any time it happens but it is especially sucktacular when it happens on weekends. 

I don’t know if I met the work deadline in my dreams because my dog woke me up AGAIN by scratching at the bedroom door so she could go outside and do her business, AGAIN.  Had my husband been in bed with me I would have kicked him and pretended I hadn’t, pretended I was sound asleep, and he would have heard her and gotten up and taken her outside.  But of course he wasn’t there.  So I tried to fool the dog into sleep by calling her name all sweet and enticing like until she jumped back on the bed, and then I petted her, hoping she’d fall asleep and forget about her need to pee for the second time in three hours.  But it was wasted petting because she didn’t fall asleep, and she jumped down off the bed and scratched at the door with her mangy paw until I gave up and took her downstairs to let her out again. 

This time, as I headed back up to bed, I started thinking about Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the book I have been reading, and how perhaps there was a vampire RIGHT BEHIND ME ON THE STAIRS and so I ran up the stairs as fast as I could, cursing the dog and the scary book and the night and the fact that I had to get up in a few short hours to go running.  Of course when I got to the top of the stairs my heart was pounding, and as I climbed into bed AGAIN, I could feel my heartbeat and hear it in my ears.  Like a bad drum beat.  In the middle of the night.

I tried to fall asleep again but this time my brain wouldn’t shut off and I just kept thinking of all kinds of shit: the route I was planning to run, how cold it would be in the morning, the birthday party Snags had to go to in the afternoon, whether or not I’d let the dog back in the house if she woke me up a third time, the laundry I needed to take care of so I’d have some clean clothes for work, the Halloween decorations that I needed to put away, the scary book I was reading…

Then I realized it was hot in the room.  I tried to ignore the feeling but it wasn’t getting any better, so I threw off the covers.  That didn’t help so I got up and changed out of my flannel pajamas into something not so flannely and crawled back under the covers trying to decide if I should leave the flannels on the floor or put them in the bed under the covers.  In the morning, I knew, I’d be cold and want to change, but the flannel pajamas would be too cold to put back on if I left them on the floor. Even in different pajamas I was hot, so I had to get up again to turn on the ceiling fan.  Ten minutes later, of course, I was freezing, so I had to pull all the covers up onto the bed again.  All in all, between the temperature game and my brain that was on overload, I was awake for an hour and a half.  Add to that the treks up and down the stairs to let my dog out, and the stranger dog barking outside somewhere, and instead of gaining an hour of sleep, I lost a ton.

What’s that saying?  One step forward, two steps back?  So I’m mad. And bitter.  I can’t get that sleep back.  It’s gone forever.  And sadly, I know that when Spring rolls around, and we all have to move our clocks forward again, I’ll be even more behind.