10 Things You Need to Know Before You Have Your First Kid.

When I was pregnant with my first, I soaked up all the parenting books, overflowing with their advice on how to get the baby to sleep through the night or proper swaddling techniques or burping techniques or get-the-baby-to-stop-crying techniques.

It's all garbage.

Look, if you are pregnant right now and reading this, I am going to save you a lot of time and tell you everything you need to know right here.

1.) If you are pregnant with your first kid, do not do ANYTHING except sleep. Just sleep, and sleep, and sleep. If you get up and the clock says 10am, fluff your pillow and go right back to sleep. May I even suggest having someone take video of you sleeping? It will be a great memory to treasure...and cry over....in the months ahead.

2.) That said, sleep deprivation is torturous. If you have a kid that sleeps through the night, get down on your knees every hour on the hour and thank your lucky stars. Don't ever complain about anything ever again.

If you have a kid that doesn't sleep through the night, quickly disassociate yourself from any friends who have kids sleeping through the night, as that will only make you feel even worse than you already do on zero sleep. (Oh yes, it's possible to feel worse.) It is perfectly ok to make yourself feel better by making predictions about all those parents with the sleeping kids...like they will probably have a horrendous time with potty training, or their kids will be the weird ones who eat boogers.

3.) Realize that anything you think is weird and swear your kids will NEVER do, they will do. Like eat their boogers.

4.) Never do anything productive like clean out and reorganize cabinets full of toys.

5.) If you ignore my advice on #4, this will happen about seven minutes after you are done putting the last airplane in the newly created "Airplane Bin".

6.) Do me a favor and look up "airplane bins" and "at the end of her wits" in a baby book right now.

7.) I told you those books are garbage.

8.) Set your expectations low for the day. For example, "Today I will wipe away the crusty eye boogers from my eye." That way, anything else you accomplish for the day is bonus and you feel good about how productive you are.

9.) Throw away any and all pre-pregnancy shirts now. Trust me on this. Even if you lose all the baby weight. Something really weird happens once you have a baby: all your old shirts become belly button baring crop tops.

It's the strangest phenomena I've ever seen.

10.) Ignore any advice given to you by other moms who are dressed to the nines, in full perfect makeup, with their perfect kids lined up beside them. Do, however, accept any advice from their nanny, housekeeper, night nurse, or assistant.

Feel free to ask questions, get advice, or complain away to any moms who are tired, hungry, mismatched, or bitter about airplane bins. They get it.

But don't trust anyone in a crop top. That's just wrong.