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.
