The end of times, sorry, the end of daylight savings is upon us parents.

Do you remember when the clocks changed in that era now known as “before child”?

Can you recall how you dealt with daylight savings then?

You can’t can you?

Because ‘before child’ the clocks going forwards or backwards really didn’t matter one fig did it?

You’d just wake up as usual on a Sunday morning – whenever your hangover allowed you – you’d cruise via whatever method you travelled to your local hang-out. Be it skateboard/ moped/ your pushbike/ your own two-feet and you’d be at least through your smashed avo on sourdough and half way through your second latte when you’d decide to check your phone to see what markets your buddies were nosing through today when WHOA! You’d suddenly notice that there right on Instagram was a pic of your bestie’s purchases from Zara and you knew for certain that Zara didn’t open till 10am......

And hey presto it would dawn on you.

Ah the clocks changed didn’t they?

Aside from the fact there would always be someone who turned up to work an hour early (or late) on the Monday morning claiming they slept through Sunday and never even knew it happened for a whole 24 hours, it was nothing, a slight ripple in the fabric of your day. A non-event.

Oh the clocks changed did they? Ah.

Hey can I grab cold pressed green juice. Thanks hon.

Fast forward to now.

Fast-forward to the cataclysmic, life shattering, earth changing even that is dawning on us parents this weekend.

THE CLOCKS ARE CHANGING.

You knew didn’t you? You've known for weeks. You’ve planned for it and googled it. You’ve dreaded it.

You’ve known it’s soon about to WRECK YOUR LIFE. DESTROY YOUR SLEEP FURTHER.

Cause unequivocal havoc.

The baby will now be feeding at 3am instead of 4am (or is that 2am? I can never work these things out).

The toddler is now refusing to go to bed at 7pm and the kids can’t play in the garden till dark anymore and are instead under your feet in the kitchen demanding dinner because its dark outside, while you are struggling to bloody well cope because you’ve had no sleep.

That extra hour we are meant to get this weekend vanishes because the kids get up early anyway and the whole thing is just a life changing mess.

The funny thing is that really if we could stop for a minute and calm down and get things in perspective we would see that its only an hour, just one, just 60 minutes, and that really how hard can that be to adjust to. Heh? As my best (childless) friend likes to remind me.

But for some parents the struggle is real. Toddlers especially can find the whole process of gaining an hour throws their body clock right out as it messes with their circadian rhythms.

Those experts who know such things recommend slowly adjusting your little one’s sleep patterns two weeks before the time change (whoops.. missed that), they say to start to put your baby to bed 10 minutes later than usual, increasing by 10 minutes every other night.

For toddlers they say to put them to bed a little later than usual on Saturday night and get them up half an hour later than they would normally wake up.

Supposedly this works for every other child in the world except mine.

The other advice I’ve had is to just move to Queensland – after all I hear the curtains aren’t even faded one tiny bit up there.

How do you cope with the time change?