Beck Vass: The extra hour that might kill you

Sometimes a short walk to school can take a lot of energy. Photo / Getty Images

My kids are waking up crazy early at the moment.

I made muffins before school today. Muffins!

It's nice to have time to have everything ready in the morning, but sometimes it just gives the kids more time to fight.

I've written about this phenomenon before, in the lead up to daylight saving last September.

This time, daylight saving is ending and I have (sort-of) good news. The clocks are going back in three weeks. That means we gain one precious hour of sleep, or exercise, or whatever it is you want to do for that hour.

Every year, I think "we should start walking to daycare/school" or "I should go for a run" or start some healthy new habit with this extra hour of precious time, and then I just don't.

The kids just seem to adjust themselves in advance of these time changes, and we start wondering why they are acting up and then we realise they are tired and we should be putting them to bed an hour earlier.

The other day, they were fighting over who got to sit on the middle stool at the kitchen bench AGAIN and it was only 7.30am. I was going to lose it with another hour of them scrapping like this, so I announced in a fake-happy voice that was disguising the fact that I was about to have a breakdown: "Who wants to scoot to school? If we get ready now, we'll have time to scoot!"

It was a stupid idea but the kids started scrambling. Hallelujah. I carried the backpack because no 5-year-old can possibly carry the number of things they need in their own school backpack, and we started our odyssey.

The fighting started seconds later. Each time one of them passed the other, there was shouty-whining. "He passed me, I want to be first," and so on, as little bits of my soul died.

At one point, I was carrying the backpack, two scooters, and two helmets as my son stood crying, wanting to be carried.

What do you think I am, a bus?

We dropped his sister at school and started going home. But then my boy screamed and cried because his scooter wasn't working.

I told him it was because he was standing on the brake, but he was too far gone.

He wanted to go down the hill with his foot on the brake, and that was that.

We got through that and then he started crying because we had to go up a small rise.

We stopped four times because his socks slumped in his shoes and toddlers are weird about anything in their shoes.

A man biking past saw us sitting on the side of a road, me messaging a friend in exasperation. He grinned and rang his bike bell.

"Where is my bell? I want a bell!" my boy started shouting.

I'm never letting you kids get fresh air and sunshine again.

It took us almost an hour to "scoot" the 1km back home. I ran a marathon that was less stressful than this. But hey, we got there.

And in three weeks, it won't matter if it takes us two hours.

Daylight saving ends, with clocks being wound back one hour, at 2am on Sunday April 1.

My thoughts are with you.