DAD DIARY: Body clocks, baby clocks and bladders

ANY parent will know that the clocks going back doesn’t mean you get an extra hour in bed. That’s one of the perks of life you signed away when you decided to have kids.
But it isn’t a big deal, one hour.
What is more problematic, though, is the week afterwards when the kids’ body clocks are all over the shop and not capable of adjusting.
To be fair, the eldest two, Frankie and Éamon, have been a dream in this regard. On the Saturday the clocks were going back, we kept them up an hour later and changed their Gro Clocks in their rooms to the new time. (The Gro Clocks are programmed to come on at 7.30am. The clocks show stars for the nighttime, and then the sun shines when it is morning. They work really well.)
They stayed in bed until 7.30am on the Sunday, even though that was 8.30am in old money. And every night since then, no stir from them until 7.30am.
Séimí, however, was another matter. Before the clocks went back, we had two solid weeks of him sleeping until between 6.45am and 7.30am every morning. We felt we had finally cracked it.
He woke that Sunday at 6am. Since then it has been anywhere from 5.30am to 6.15am. On two precious mornings we’ve been lucky to get to 7am.
And the trouble is then that he gets tired very easily during the day. We’ve tried all the different tricks for getting him to wait in bed until a respectable hour, but if he stays in the cot he’s wide awake and either shouting or crying. It’s little wonder he is tired later on in the day!
It’s worth adding that a tired Séimí is a force of nature. Some of us when we are tired just sit down and relax. Séimí’s reaction to being tired consists of the most head-piercing tantrums imaginable.
In his defence, there’s another contributing factor. Séimí is toilet training – and making great progress in most aspects. So much so, he has had a dry pull up at night for two weeks straight.
But, trouble is, when he feels the need to go, he calls us. If that’s 2am or 3am, he will go back after using the potty in his room. If it is 5.30am, he will feel he has had enough sleep. Before toilet training, he would have just gone in his sleep, but now he doesn’t want to do that anymore. Which is great, but the consequences of it do not include a full night’s sleep for him or for us. Quite the opposite.
So between the clocks going back and the toilet training, it has been a perfect storm of broken sleep patterns. We endured likewise with Frankie and Éamon but, aged 41, I can definitely feel the difference energy-wise now, compared to a few short years ago.
Needless to say, we’re now fully subscribed members of the campaign to stop the clocks going back.