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Monday, June 25, 2012

OK to Wake - How to set light timer

My children get up early. Really early. So early that Andrew and I have become trained to think that 6:30am is "sleeping in" and 7:00am is sinfully late. The baby is excused from this analysis because of her babyhood, but the two older children would get up at 5:15am every day if we let them, no matter what time they had gone to bed.

We tried a lot of things to keep the children in bed longer - wait, that's a lie. We tried two things. First we tried keeping them up later, but, as I said, that didn't work. All we got were two very cranky early risers for our troubles. So we made a rule that they could not get up until the dining room clock bonged. This clock has a setting to turn off the chimes between 10:00pm ad 6:00am, so that rule bought us an extra 30-45 minutes, but, man, did we wish we could sleep in till 6:30 on the weekends at least.

We finally caved and bought the "OK to Wake" clock, and it was a life-changer. We set the clock to turn green at 6:15 (Andrew has to leave at 6:30 on the weekdays, so that way he could at least say good morning), and called it a day. It worked a treat, I'll tell you. But, man, was it an enormous pain in the neck to set. Between the two of us, Andrew an I hold five degrees in various fields of engineering. FIVE. Two bachelors, two masters, and one doctorate. You'd think, then, that we'd be able to program a clock, right?

Well, we did figure it out, but a while back we lost power and could not for the life of us figure out how to reset the light timer. The main problem was the terrible, terrible clock design, but this problem was compounded by our forgetting to ever figure it out until we were putting children to bed in a dark room and did not have fifteen minutes to fiddle with buttons. Until today! I finally took time when all the children were awake and have decided to write down the steps for programming this clock for easy reference for all.

1. Press and hold the "Light" button for two seconds.
2. The clock will say "on" on the front. Set the time for when you want the night light to come on (yellow light); for example, 8:00pm.
3. Press the light button again, clock will say "off." Set the time for when you want all the lights to turn off. Perhaps 8:00am.
4. Press the light button again, clock will say "CNG." This stands for "Change" and is the time the light will switch from yellow to green. The elusive "OK to wake!" time; e.g., 7:00am.
5. Press the light button again. The clock should have a little light bulb on the front indicating the light timer is on.

Done.

6 comments:

Jessica said...

Wow, that does sound complicated.

I wish this would work on Paul. He thinks 5:30 is the appropriate time to wake up.

Erica said...

Laughing because my husband has 3 engineering degrees and is so smart in some ways but simple stuff like this usually confounds him. I have that same clock and never had a problem with it but I would never imagine asking uri to set it. But I can ask him all sorts of things I'd use a calculator for and he will quickly compute it in his head. You engineers are a breed apart! But a good breed of course!

Laura Diniwilk said...

I might have to get me one of these. Expensive, but worth it if the 3 year old obeys it. Thanks!

Joy said...

Well timed post; we were just talking of getting one. Thanks!!

NGS said...

A common refrain in our family full of lawyers, doctors, and professors is "how many advanced degrees does it take" to (fill in the blank with some random item for small humans)? The children just want us to know that they are smarter than us, I think.

Unknown said...

Been using my clock with no issues for about 6 months.
Now suddenly about 20 mins before the green light comes on (schedules time) the clock is glowing yellow at 550am. Can’t figure out why or how to change it