Score

The early morning hours are not my favorite time to be a parent. Especially icky is when I'm up before the sun gazing bleary-eyed at my daughter, who's ready to start her day. Shakira and I refer to the state of just waking up as blinky, as in "Petal is often blinky after a nap." To add insult to injury, when you're up in the predawn hours with a begging to be entertained baby or toddler, it's all you. Hours until playgroup or until the library and the stores open. The streets and playgrounds uninvitingly chilly with lingering night air. No, the early morning is definitely not the highlight of my day.

As the end of daylight savings time drew nearer and nearer, I resigned myself to at least temporarily having a whole extra hour of early morning time to battle. It seemed inevitable.

So imagine Jack and my delight when on Saturday morning, Petal slumbered until the totally civilized hour of 8 am. We immediately decided to start observing standard time a day early and pushed Petal's schedule back an hour for the remainder of the day. And it seems to have worked. This morning I awoke at 7:15 to a room bathed with sunlight shortly before Petal summoned me through the baby monitor. I could get used to this.