Life
When Do We Fall Back In 2019? Maybe Your Kid Will Let You Sleep In This Time
Parents everywhere, rejoice! Soon we shall all play god and change the time the sun rises into the sky, thus ensuring ourselves another hour of sweet, sweet slumber. I'm talking about daylight saving time, of course. And ha ha, just kidding, you have little kids! You'll never feel rested again. Still, when do we fall back in 2019?
Well, you don't have much time to prepare: This year, daylight saving time begins on Sunday, November 3, according to Live Science. I feel like every year I am reminded that it's Daylight Saving Time, not Daylight Savings Time. And then I immediately forget, and come March I'm like, "When is daylight savings time again?" It's just one of those weird things my brain refuses to get right. Like when I tell my husband someone changed their mind and did "a total 360," and his engineer brain explodes, as he sighs and reminds me for the 1 billionth time that no, they did not do a 360, they did a 180.
Anyway! We're turning the clocks back this Sunday, people. Fortunately, with the invention of smartphones, the time change is done for us automatically, via satellites, or magic, or Tim Cook making a blood sacrifice to the computer gods. Something of that nature. All I know is that the numbers on our phones change to the correct time. Which sadly means we no longer have the slapstick comedy routines of my youth, where my parents would forget to manually "turn the clocks back," then wake up and go into a wild panic, before sighing in relief after realizing that no, it merely means they have another full hour to drink Folgers before wrestling everyone into khakis for church.
But even with the time change being pretty much automatic, many parents (i.e. my husband and I) still find DST to be quite annoying, as it messes with kids' body clocks, and can generally take about a week to get everyone back on track. It has other adverse effects as well, some of which are far worse than cranky kids. Business Insider reports that there is also a rise in both traffic accidents and heart attacks due to DST.
There have of course been various pushes throughout the United States to either make DST permanent, or to do away with it completely. California and Florida have both passed measures to make changes, though they still haven't been approved by the federal government. As Vox reports, as of right now, the only states who officially don't observe DST are Arizona and Hawaii.
So, come this Sunday, most of us shall be forced to be time travelers starting at 2am. If you are the parent of a small child, you will most likely be awake for the exact moment, as you will already be up and explaining how that devil clown your kid saw on Halloween is 100 percent not real, and is most definitely not hiding in the closet. Perhaps to distract your kid from the devil clown, you can explain that you've all just traveled back in time, and now everyone is one hour younger. Then pull up pics of the Back to the Future car for them on your phone. That should buy you a solid ten minutes of peace.