Last night, as I had just settled our resident non-sleeper back down for approximately the one hundredth time, I decided to give up and do some mindless scrolling on-line while awaiting the next wake up call.
As I scrolled, my bloodshot eyes landed on some truly amazing and life altering information! My fellow parents of small insomniacs, I have some incredible news:
Our endlessly exhausting offspring have not just been sent to turn us into mindless zombies, stumbling through the day in search of brains, or coffee.
They also happen to be gifted! That’s right, gifted kids need less sleep according to studies.
When Peter Fleming, a professor at the University of Bristol, spoke to Buzzfeed News, he claimed there is a link between
“very high levels of development and intellectual achievement and not sleeping throughout the night.”
Bam! That’s right folks. Being up all night, every night might be slowly sapping your will to live, but now you don’t need to worry. Now you know that this mind numbing lack of sleep will all be worth it one day, because your little darling is a genius.
Imagine the conversations you can have at parent groups now.
“Geez Janice, you look like hell. Did the baby have you up all night?”
“Why yes Karen, he did. Yours sleeps through the night now right? Awe, that’s a bummer. But I guess now you can spend that college fund on something fun instead.”
While all the self-righteous parents of the world are bragging about their children sleeping a full eight hours straight, you and I can take comfort in the fact that our future doctors and scientists and world leaders woke up twenty times because the sheer brilliance of their thoughts was startling them awake.
When we are asked for the fourth drink of water, or bottle or yet another nursing session at three A.M., we now know that our child is simply dehydrated because their brains are working so hard that they are overheating.
In fact, Professor Flemming goes on to say that,
“Human infants are not designed to sleep for long periods. It’s not good for them, and there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that there is any benefit to anybody from having a child that sleeps longer and consistently.”
Professor, I couldn’t agree more. Sleep is for the weak.
Never mind the fact that I found a tub of hummus in my purse recently and have no recollection of how it got there.
It’s totally cool that I put the lunch meat away in the cutlery drawer last week and the milk in the cupboard with the cereal.
All of the missed appointments and forgotten deadlines are truly a small price to pay. There would be no benefit whatsoever to having more sleep.
When my future Einstein leaves home to develop technology that will save the human race, perhaps I’ll finally find time to grab a nap.
My fellow zombie parents rejoice.
Now, in the middle of the night, instead of worrying about how on earth we are going to function at work the next day, or googling just how much coffee is actually safe for human consumption, we have something new to focus on.
Now we can doze off in the middle of looking up current tuition costs for fancy colleges, because our kids are gifted.
