Monday, March 17, 2008

Sleepy time time

Recently we hosted seven 10-year-olds for a sleepover birthday party, though if you have children you know the word “sleep” doesn’t belong in that sentence.

Actually, two out of the seven did fall asleep. At 4:30 a.m. For a couple of hours.

I suspect there were several households with grumpy children come early afternoon, when the sugar and excitement wore off. (There was at least one grumpy adult, yours truly, even after a rare afternoon cup of coffee.)

What was most amazing to me — though it shouldn’t have been, since all of the participants were girls — is that even after being up all night the girls were still talking nonstop. All seven of them. At once.

I don’t mean to generalize or sound sexist, but we’ve driven to and from the beach many times and I realize at the end that our son, Adam, hasn’t said a word for the entire trip. His three sisters, on the other hand…

Anyway, I went to bed at midnight, came downstairs at 3 a.m. to ask the girls to think about going to sleep or, at the very least, drop the noise level (all of the girls were in sleeping bags in our family room; well, sitting on their sleeping bags in the family room), and woke up at 7 a.m. I think the girls were having the same conversation every time though, to be fair, I could only partially understand what they were talking about.

This is very different from our son’s birthday parties where, one friend observed, reminded her of a group of puppies playfully tumbling over each other again and again. In fact, if puppies ate pizza it might be almost exactly the same.

In our house the deal is that you get a big birthday party until the age of 10. After that it’s you, a parent and a couple of friends going out for dinner and a movie. This means we have only one child left who qualifies for big birthday celebrations.

Next year I’m encouraging a bowling party.

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