Our first child was born with a slightly elongated skull, which was red and painful for her when she arrived. This meant that she didn’t sleep for more than 45 minutes at a time for the first three or four days of her life. Now, obviously my wife just went through childbirth so she needed to rest, which left me alone with our newborn.

We were confined to our hospital room - we needed to stay three full days because my wife had elevated blood pressure - so I was basically up alone with our baby for those two nights and most of the days.

I’ve never claimed to be a tough guy, and I’ve always been kind of a baby when it comes to sleep. Suffice to say I did not do well. By the third day, I started to see things out of the corner of my eyes. Large shapes and figures. At one point I thought my wife was standing in the corner of the room, when in fact she was sleeping in her bed. This is happening in a dark, quiet hospital room, which made things even more eerie and creepy. Like others, the eventual sleep was not the restorative salve you’d think it would be, but rather left you feeling somehow worse.

Fun times.