I recently wound up in a conversation with someone who is about a month from becoming a father for the first time. I feel like it's my sworn duty to make sure all soon-to-be-parents are given two valuable (and unwanted) pieces of my infinite wisdom: 1.) Don't spend good money on a good changing table because your kid is just going to cover it in poop and 2.) That thing people say about newborns not sleeping? They lie. A lot.

It's about 135134098535 times worse than anyone tells you it's going to be.

It's not that people are trying to lie, of course. It's that there just aren't words in the English language that adequately describe the level of sleep deprivation that comes with that first month or so. The closest I've ever come is to tell people that it's like you set your alarm clock for 2:00am and then hit snooze when it goes off. Instead of going back to sleep, you walk down the hall, thread a needle, watch a high school drama club reenact an episode of Seinfeld, sell a life insurance plan to a 7-year old, and then go back to bed, only to have the alarm go off again 15 minutes later. Once again, you hit snooze. You repeat the whole process. Over and over. All night long. For a month. Or longer.

I then mentioned to the soon-to-be-father that it really sucks that I apparently got a defective model of baby girl. Mine STILL doesn't sleep. I explained that she just plain doesn't need sleep, as if she's some sort of robot or something.

Somewhere along the line, his eyes got big and he started to look a little worried. "My wife is like that. She doesn't need sleep either and never has."

He was concerned that the baby might take after his wife, but some of the words he said floated out of his mouth bearing flashing lights, sirens, exclamation points, and pure joy.

His wife is a doctor.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

A purpose!

A goal!

A use for that no need to sleep superpower!

When we're done paying for med school for Alexis, I'm making her buy me my very own sleeping quarters. I don't care where they are or what they look like, but the kid owes me nearly five years of good sleep.