Mum’s talk... by Sarah Reid
The extra daylight of spring is glorious for so many reasons – walks in the evening, or the little thrill you get from leaving work before it gets dark. But while you’d have to be the world’s biggest curmudgeon to deny the joy of it, there’s one group of people who welcome it a bit halfheartedly.
The fi rst few weeks of spring can be a trying time for parents of young
children. Initially there’s scepticism from the small pyjama-toting person. It’s not dark, it can’t possibly be bedtime. It’s not dark, I’m not tired. It’s not dark, I should be playing. Seeing is believing, and if you can see the trampoline outside you believe you should be jumping on it.
In autumn and winter, before they learn to tell the time, bedtime is identifi ed as that dark time after bathtime. But in the absence of darkness all bets are off . Television schedules can be helpful at backing up a desperate parent, but before long the wide-awake youngster assumes the programmers are in on the conspiracy and you’re back to square one.
Even if you succeed in getting them into bed, the window is a newly discovered attraction and they’re clambering out of bed to verify the continuing lack of darkness every few minutes. Before you know it, it’s bedtime plus
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one and there’s not so much as a yawn. Well there is, but it’s from you, so that’s not helpful. When at last they succumb, in some kind of mad triumph of hope over experience you briefl y fantasise that they’ll make up that lost hour of sleep in the morning. But no – things just get worse. Not only have they resisted sleep in the evening, they don’t even seem to need as much the next morning. I’ve known parents to be woken at 4.30am by children dressed and ready, demanding to know when they’re going out.
Perhaps the extra daylight is topping them up with vitamin D, energising them after that long, gloomy winter and fi lling them with the joys of spring. Which is great, of course, but sometimes it’s also nice when it’s dark and everyone can just go to sleep.
You can follow Sarah on Twitter @sarahereid7
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