Last week was the first week of school for two of my children, and it was a week where work and volunteer obligations collided into a convoluted mess. By Friday night I was done. Toast.

So I went to bed at 8:30 p.m. and vowed to sleep as much as I possibly could. I managed to sleep for 11 amazing hours and a bonus 45 minutes. It was the best thing ever.

I knew that my body so desperately needed the rest, but my long night of sleep also proved to me that my brain was a fractured mess of sleep deprivation. That night I had awful nightmares, where friends of mine with small babies died for different reasons -- and then their husbands just replaced them with nannies and life went on.

We don't need to delve into the obvious Freudian meanings of these dreams. We all know what they mean.

Anyway, last night I was hoping for a repeat performance (of marathon sleep, not of nightmares) but all I managed was a still respectable 8.5 hours of sleep. I was nowhere as exhausted as I was the night before, and my dreams were much improved.

Then last night I dreamt that I hung out with Michael Phelps and Barack Obama. In case you were wondering what we were all up to, Barack and I exchanged charming child-raising anecdotes while a horrified Michael vowed to never have children. It was a fun dream where I casually hung out with the President and the gold-medal-winningnest olympian as if we were old girlfriends, no big deal.

It was a vast improvement over being replaced by faceless nannies, that's for sure.

As a bonus, and this is no dream, I weighed myself this morning and I weigh three pounds less than I did last weekend. Coincidence? I think not.

The moral of this story is that we all need to get the hell to sleep already. Let's go to bed, friends. Let's do it early.