Time change timing: What were they thinking?

When The Powers That Be decided to bump the time change ahead by a few weeks, you have to wonder if they happened to consider how shifting the time change to March would impact on the lives of parents and kids. This is peak March Break season, after all.

And it's one thing to have your child acting a little crazy as he drinks in the freedom of an entire week without school, testing his boundaries from time to time to see if the regular family rules still apply.

Now add a time change to the mix. Suddenly you've got parents and kids who are scrambling to adjust to biological jet-lag on top of it all (while spending quality March Break family time with one another, possibly as much as 24/7. It sounds to me like the stuff of which really bad 70s sitcoms or horror flicks were made.

We can't boycott the time change. (Well, we could, but we'd be late for everything between now and November, when the clocks move in the other direction, which could land us and our kids in a lot of hot water at work and at school.) So we're kind of forced to get in sync with the rest of the people in our time zone, whether we like it or not. And the best way to do that is to sync our time clocks by getting up at the new time in the morning, seven days a week. Soon it will start to feel like the new normal. (No, I can't promise that you'll actually start humming in the morning if you're hard-wired to be a night owl.)

Other things you can do to ease the time zone transition and the resulting grumpiness fallout include:

• establishing a regular schedule for eating and sleeping, since your circadian rhythm (your body's sleep-wake cycle) is anchored by your various biological activities;
• going easy with the caffeine, as opposed to using caffeine to vboost your lagging energy levels as you deal with the time zone fallout (too much caffeine or too much caffeine too late in the afternoon and you won't be able to fall asleep at night — and now you've got a new sleep issue to deal with).
• creating a sleep-friendly environment (a room that is cool, dark, quiet and relaxing: ban all electronic devices, including TVs, videogames, laptops and Blackberrys!)

So how's the March Break (and the time zone fallout) working out for you? Who's finding it toughest to adjust: the grownups or the kids? Do you think the March Break is masking the effects of the time change so far? And for those of you in parts of the country whose kids went back to school on Monday (the day after the time zone: talk about a double whammy!) what do you have to say about the timing of the time change this year?

Related:
March Break childcare SOS