Sometimes It's The Little Things

One of my most vivid childhood memories is of my dad, running around the house turning off light switches, hollering at the top of his voice: "Why are all these <bleep> lights on? How hard is it to turn a <bleep> light off? I'm going to start charging your allowance for the electric bill." (You will notice that I did not claim this was one of my "fondest" memories.)

Fast forward a number of years…It's sometime around 8:30am, every single day, and I find myself walking or running through the house after the chaotic, hurricane-like efforts of getting four people ready and out the door on time turning off one light after another, muttering under my breath those same exact words. Including the bleeps. Except my husband doesn't have an allowance so I can't really make good on that threat. It seems ridiculous that our morning routine requires every single light in the house to be turned on. And what is it about light switches that makes it so incredibly simple to turn them on as you run upstairs and down the hall for that one last thing you forgot, and so impossible to turn off as you barrel back out of the house? I don't know. Some scientists need to get on the root cause of this phenomenon.

In our case, we finally got smart and put some smart lighting in our house. The "upstairs off" button? A Godsend. The "good-bye" button by the door to the garage that turns off all the lights in the house? My favorite. Even the hubby and the kids think it's cool. My son calls them "magic lights." And they kind of are.