not like the all-nighters I pulled in college

There's nothing quite like going to bed two hours earlier than you normally do, after cleaning the house and mopping the floors, only to turn on the television and catch the second half of "Sleeping with the Enemy".

And then, once the movie ends, see that they are showing "Sleeping with the Enemy" again, and since it's been 16 years since you've seen this suspense film from the beginning, you decide to watch up to the point when you tuned in, earlier in the evening.

But, instead, you watch the whole thing just to see if you are as freaked out when Julia Roberts opens the kitchen cupboards and sees all the cans neatly aligned. And before you know it, you are going to sleep an hour later than you normally would and full of fear that some psychopath will sneak in to your house in the middle of the night and line up the fringe on your bathroom towels.

Just as you are about to fall asleep, after suffering a dry coughing fit that lasts for a solid 30-minutes, you are soon startled by one of your children screaming that they are wet, but when you run in to their room before they wake up the whole house, the first thing that you notice is the smell of vomit.

And when you turn on the lights, you see that there is vomit everywhere. All over the bed, pillows, blankets, walls and guard rails. The child that is screaming is covered in vomit from their head to their toes and another child is screaming that there is "Bomit all ovah BUNNY!"

After you give the vomit-covered child a bath and your spouse changes all of the linens on their bed - including the waterproof mattress pad and waterproof slip covers on all of the pillows, you bring the freshly cleaned child back in to their bedroom and as you prepare to put them in bed, they begin vomiting again all over the floor that you had just mopped.

You reconsider putting them in bed and instead, decide to let them sleep on gymnastic mats in the family room. So you haul pillows and blankets - and waterproof pads - and make a sick bed on your floor, while your spouse cleans up the floor and sets up a sleeping station on the couch so that he can be near in case they are sick again.

Stealing a glance at the clock on your way back to bed, you calculate that had you not watched the stupid movie twice, you would have been asleep for four hours before this wake-up call, you've been up for two hours dealing with it, and chances are excellent that your fourth child will be awake within an hour.

No sooner do you lay your head on your pillow and start to fall back to sleep, but you hear the familiar cry of your baby. As you groggily climb out of bed, you notice that the sky is turning lighter. You return to bed with your baby and are hopeful that maybe you'll be able to close your eyes for just a minute...

But instead, you are startled by a shrill little voice proclaiming "The sun is up for the day evwybody wake-up!!"

When you stagger out to the family room and place your baby on your snoring husband's chest, he turns and looks at you with bags under his eyes that are large enough to hold your entire wardrobe. On the ground is a sick child with a bowl that had previously been used as a catch basin on her head, and your young son is pretending that his tangerine is a soccer ball and demanding french toast for breakfast.

Knowing that I've got a full day before me ... I feel more desperate and pathetic than I ever did walking in to a Calculus final.