Tuesday, February 7, 2012

A Day Without Time

There has been a little bit of talk lately in some the blogs I follow about time. Time is something, as adults, we pay attention to a lot, or at least I know I do. I realized a long time ago though, that Reece has no idea what time means. For him, there is daytime and night time; that is it. During the daytime we play, eat, have fun, run some errands and so on and during night time we sleep, or least we try to. That is the limit of his understanding of time at this point in his life.
I often get caught up in his time, losing track of an afternoon while we play together. It feels so great not to be looking at the clock, to just let it go. This weekend, Justin and I decided to live an entire day without time, to really take Reece's lead and just go with flow.

On Saturday evening, once Reece was tucked in for the night, we went around the house covering all the digital clocks with a piece of paper and some tape, we hid the one table clock we have and went out to the car to cover that one too. We decided we would not listen to the radio, so we wouldn’t be told the time that way, and since Sunday is a screen free day, we would not be able to see the time on the TV or the computer. 
When we got into bed on Saturday night we were both pretty excited to see what the day would hold.
So, we have no idea what time we got up and it was pretty cool to just get up and go about our day. We had pancakes for breakfast, we played for a bit, packed up some snacks and headed out for a drive. We wanted to hit the alpaca farm, but unfortunately they were closed for some reason, so it was onwards to the hiking trail, with birdseed in hand, to feed the birds and do a little hiking.



We were blessed with a wonderful day on Sunday, the sun was peeking through the clouds a bit and the temperatures were above normal again, much like most of our winter this year.










We had a great time feeding the birds, playing with the ducks and hiking before heading to the car, stopping for tea and then heading home. It was awesome to just go with the flow and not wonder what the time was.

At home, we played some more, used the setting sun to determine when dinner was to be served and enjoyed the rest of the evening relaxing.  Reece did have a little melt down before bed and we think we might have been a little late with his usual evening schedule, it was hard to tell once the sun set, what time it might be. All in all it was a great day, and something we will do again.

It was magical to just go about the day with no worries about the time or a schedule.

13 comments:

  1. What a neat idea! And I love the pictures of the feeding of the birds! My girls would be over the moon to have a chickadee sitting on their hands like that!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It was, and we will do it again. Feeding the birds is so much fun, Reece actually had one land on his hand in the fall, and also had a chipmunk eat out of his hand too! This time he didn't get so lucky, but he was okay with that since both Justin and I were able to show him the ones we managed to feed.

      Delete
  2. i love this idea of following your own rhythm, unassisted by clocks. eat when hungry. sleep when tired. so simple, isn't it?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It is so simple, and really too bad we fall out of following our own rhythm. We need to do it more often.

      Delete
  3. What a fantastic idea! I'm going to have to borrow that. How different our worlds would all be if we didn't focus so much on this artificial thing called time.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks KC, go ahead and give it a try, I look forward to reading all about it on your blog :)

      Delete
  4. I love that you did this! I'm very inspired to try. Thanks for sharing!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Sounds like you made the very best of these out-out-of-the-ordinary high temperatures. How neat to see those little birds eating out of a big human hand! Days without a schedule are precious and few around here, but always most welcome!

      Delete
    2. Thanks Gretchen, it was a lot of fun and something we will do again for sure, thinking a few days in a row might be fun.

      Delete
    3. It was a great day and the birds were so very happy we and many others stopped by to feed them. We love unscheduled go with the flow days around here too and like you we just don't seem to get enough of them. Trying harder though to squeeze more in.

      Delete
  5. It was a glorious day. And you can bet we will be spending many more days without time :)

    ReplyDelete