Clocks Changing & Lookalikes

When you have children, especially babies who (all the time) you are thinking of sleep and their sleep patterns, and you realise that the clock change is coming, fear comes over you, especially if it’s the clocks going forward. It’s meant to bless us with a brighter summer and lighter nights but what it actually does is completely screw up the sleeping patterns that you’ve spent trying to establish. I hope I’m not alone in my thoughts here! So I did a lot of research into the lead up and came up with some reasons why the clocks going forward is hell for all parents –

1 Trying to adjust does your head in – Okay, so the clocks are going forward by one hour. So 6pm becomes 7pm, and 7pm becomes 8pm. To help your child adjust, you’re going to have to start moving their bedtime backwards by 10-15 minutes a day, over the course of the week leading up to the clocks changing.

2 You never remember to go to bed earlier – the night the clocks change, knowing that your going to be having an hour’s less kip than usual, aim to go to bed at a respectable hour to make up for the one less hour. Needless to say, this doesn’t happen and when we’re still up at 1am unable to fall asleep, it’s enough to make you go insane.

3 They won’t go to bed – Usually at bedtime, everything is dark, quiet and conducive to sleep – but not any more. Once the clocks have changed, it’s still as light at 8pm as it used to be at 7pm and as a result, everyone is WIDE awake.

4 They don’t sleep in any later – In theory, going to bed later should mean your child stays in bed an hour later the next morning. This doesn’t happen, they’ll spring out of bed at their usual obscenely early time, demanding food and entertainment – and your one and only annual hope of a lie-in goes up in smoke.

5 Your whole routine is screwed – Because everything is happening an hour later than usual, your entire daily routine goes to pot and they will be VILE by bedtime. When your child gets an hour’s less sleep than usual, someone always has to pay. By mid-afternoon, that missed hour will have well and truly caught up with them, and from then until bedtime, it’s a one-way ticket to Meltdown Central. But will they concede to going to bed any earlier? Of course not.

It’s okay, though, because in seven months, when BST ends and the clocks go back again, we get to do it all again in reverse. I found this great link that The Mirror put together of how to cope with the time change –

http://www.mirror.co.uk/lifestyle/family/how-your-kids-sleep-after-10066702

So I thought it would be interesting now Tobias has grown out of his newborn state to see who he looks more like and what features he shares with Gavin and my own families. Looking back through old pictures of myself and Gavin made for many a laugh and the results are brilliant.

Here’s a few pictures of me as a baby –