Winter is long, cold, dark, and hard on families with many smallish children. On the Sunday morning when the clocks were set back this year, I pretended to be asleep as our youngest, just a year old at the time (who proudly now carries the nickname The Attitude), began his morning routine by yelling at the Elmo he keeps with him at night.

The yelling mostly consists of youthful gibberish at this point; someday, when my son’s language resembles more like English, we hope to find out exactly what makes Elmo so offensive in the early morning.

At any rate, my saintly wife knew I was pretending, but she let me have the extra hour anyway, as she has done on nearly every “fall back” morning since our wedding. She got up to see to the kids’ breakfast, and allowed me to squeeze in that precious 60 minutes of bonus sleep. It’s in her best interest, in the long run, to give me that extra hour in the morning, because, as far as I’m concerned, that day, Fall Back day, is when the hardness of winter first gets rolling.

Sure, sure, there are plenty of days between that autumn morning in October and the days before Christmas that mark the true beginning of winter. But it’s the short daylight hours that make regular outdoor play largely impossible, save for a handful of random days of the White Death. When you have more than a couple of children, and suddenly you have to be indoors with them nearly all day, well, things get pretty interesting.

Children under the age of 10, in case you didn’t know, have enough potential energy to power the city of Poughkeepsie, New York for a full 72 hours. Be warned then, parents, if you do not give them an appropriate outlet (or six) for all that potential energy, well, rest assured they’ll be converting it to kinetic energy one way or another, regardless of your wishes. Literal bouncing off the walls is not out of the question. Seriously, in January, I had to make running up to and colliding with a wall for no apparently purpose whatsoever, officially forbidden.

The Puddinette, then, has a terrifically difficult job. I get to go to work five out of seven days and deal with adult people. Sure, some of them occasionally challenge my idea of what defines a human being, but for the most part I participate in reasonable conversations with normal people who don’t typically engage in competitions to see how loudly one can yell “poop!” while giggling, or how fast one can run in a circle from the family room to the kitchen and back, around the island, 38 times.

Last weekend, blessedly, was “spring forward” Saturday. Sure, there was the necessary adjustment period, especially for The Attitude, who is now a very opinionated 17 months old. Regardless, it was wonderful to return from work several times this week to find my children frolicking happily in the late afternoon daylight and a wife basking in the glow of glorious sunlight nearby. Everyone rushed to the car with joyful greetings of “Hi, Daddy!”, and nobody gave me a look suggesting that I better be hiding airline tickets to a Tahitian vacation in my briefcase if I expect to make it through the evening alive.

It’s sunny now, and today is the first day of official Spring. Welcome spring! I can feel my psychology bills going down already.

pud’n