It took several years of trying to have my daughter, and the whole time, people brightly told me to sleep while I could.  When I became pregnant, people continued this urgent advice-giving, the words tumbling from their lips at a madcap pace.  Of course as luck or fate (whichever is cruelest) would have it, I had terrible insomnia throughout my pregnancy.  I would get so annoyed by people who were clearly telling me to sleep just to torment me!  Then came the newborn times — the sleeplessness, the groggy commutes, the desperate wails (mine) and ugly cries (also mine).  If I thought it was torment before…hah!

During meals, how tired we were was my number one topic of conversation. And I started to dream.  Not dream as in sleep, of course (because hah!) but the agonizing daydreams of the desperately deprived.  I started to keep a running list in my head of all the things sleep was superior to.  For example…

Summer camp: Sleep is better than the first day of summer camp stretching out in all its golden sunny possibility.

Root beer floats: Sleep is superior to root beer floats, even when the ice cream is not just vanilla but vanilla bean.

Cuddling up with Calvin & Hobbes: Sleep is better than curling up on the couch with a well-loved copy of Calvin & Hobbes.

Picnics: Sleep is always preferable to a lazy picnic spread out on a park lawn.

Bike rides in autumn when the leaves are just changing: Sleep is better than pedaling through green-golden canopies, sunlight dappling the street.

Puppies: Sleep is better than puppies, hands down.  Even Corgi puppies.

Your favorite meal (in my case, made-from-scratch chicken pot pie with extra flaky crust): Sleep is worlds better than the warmest, comfort-foodiest, delicious meal.

Trips to exotic locales: Look, if I can sleep on a plane, maybe the trip is worth it.  Otherwise, staying home and sleeping sounds preferable.

Now, as a mother of a toddler who mostly sleeps through the night (quick knock on wood here!) I still delight in sleep above most everything else…but hand me a baby and I’m pleased as punch and desperate for another, despite the sleeplessness, despite the agony of it all.  It’s funny how I would daydream of sleep the way a starving shipwrecked sailor dreams of feather beds and food, but I’d still trade that sleep for a newborn baby snuggle.

It’s strange, the way the things that drive me craziest seem not quite so bad looking back.  I think back on those dinner conversations consisting almost solely of “I’m so tired,”  “I’m so tired, too,” and smile rather than groan.  And when I see pregnant women, I want to go and tell them to sleep while they can.  It’s a sickness!  A disease!  A parasite that’s attached itself to me post-babyhood!  I don’t ever do it, but I want to so badly!  It’s odd, the way we can so effortlessly go from one side of the spectrum to the other, how we change over time — the agonies we remember, the dimming of others over time.

Sleep is better than many things.  That much I still hold as a firm truth.  But now, I find myself enjoying other things more (occasionally).  Things like sharing picnics with my daughter, cuddling up in our bed to read all snuggled up together, and riding my bike with her in the trailer behind it, laughing.

So if you’re still ready to claw the eyes out of the next person to tell you to get sleep while you can, take heart.  Soon you too may find yourself longing to tell people the same thing.  (But don’t.  Seriously, don’t!)