Daylight Savings and the Second Child

Everyone always talks about second child syndrome; how there are no pictures of the second baby, how parents who were strict and anal about bedtimes, toys and foods basically give the second baby free reign. I was not going to be like that. I have hundreds of pictures of the Little One, she has a regular routine that we try our best to stick to, yet somethings do slip through the cracks.

My girls were both born in the spring and were about the same age when we went through our first round of daylight savings time changes. Here’s how things were handled with each girl:

Several weeks before daylight savings with the Big One I began readings my sleep books and searching the Internet for tips on how the experts say to deal with the time change and how it relates to sleep schedules. We read some advice that says follow the baby’s cues, not the numbers on the clock. Others said to keep them up as long as possible, but not force them to stay up if they are too tired. And still others recommended shifting the bedtime by 15minutes or so over a couple week period of time to slowly re-adjust the baby’s internal clock to account for the time change.

I believe with the Big One we did a combination of things. We really focused more on her cues and starting the routine when she started rubbing her eyes and getting cranky. The point is we were well versed in the experts’ opinions and were very aware of how the loss of an hour would impact her schedule.

Fast forward to this most recent time change. The last thing on my mind was how the change was going to affect the Little One’s routine. Honestly with the husband gone during the week, my main focus is on survival. We take things one hour at a time until we reach the magical time when both girls are snuggly tucked in their beds. So the time change went relatively un-noticed until about 3:30 p.m. on Sunday afternoon. We had changed the clocks back one hour on Saturday night. We got up and ready for church on Sunday all was good and it seemed nothing had changed. So around 3:30 p.m. on Sunday, the Little One got really crabby. I fed her and tried to put her down for a quick nap. After all it was just past 3:30, she doesn’t go to bed until about 6 p.m. so she shouldn’t have been so tired. I left her in her crib to cry it out. After about 30 minutes, I sent Jason in to try. This was unusual for the Little One. She doesn’t like to be rocked to sleep. I feed her and then lay her down and she falls asleep on her own. After about 10 minutes of intense screaming (Little One, not the Husband) he came out of her room defeated. So I let her cry a bit longer. When she was still screaming at 4:30 I went in again and held her and rocked her until she finally tired herself out and gave up.

As we were sitting there and the room got progressively darker, it hit me. While the clock said 4:30 to the Little One’s little body it was 5:30 ….time to get in the bathtub and start her bedtime routine. I was so frustrated with her and couldn’t figure out what in the world her problem was, when really I was the one with the problem. I suffered total mommy brain, forgot about the time change and then blamed the poor kid!