Birthday girl

Well, 6-yo turned 7. She had a sleepover. I'm not a big fan of sleepovers, as I believe I'm mentioned before. However, it was what she wanted more than anything anything anything. She's in a little friendship group of four girls, and the other three, their birthdays in September, December and February, all had sleepovers. So it would have been difficult for the fourth member of the group to flake out.

It went really well, thanks for asking. I had a few activities up my sleeve, but mostly just let them play. I did get them to do a scavenger hunt, which they enjoyed, and it was very sweet watching them scuttling round the garden collecting blades of grass and small stones, and then sitting studiously drawing an animal and something that begins with B. The item they found hardest to collect, interestingly, was a list of 10 different girls' names, each one written in a different colour marker. When I put that on the hunt list, I thought it would be easy for them, but I hadn't reckoned with the way the mind of a 7 year old works. "I could write Bayley, but I'm not really friends with her, so I don't think I want her name on my list."

We watched a dvd together (they watched, I snoozed), and I had them in bed by 10.15 and asleep not long after that. Beforehand, 7-yo had been very adamant that they HAD to stay up till after midnight, because you HAVE to do that at a sleepover, and they did at EVERYONE ELSE'S sleepover. So I had prepared the ground by setting my alarm clock an hour ahead. (I was sleeping with them in the basement, where there are no other clocks.) Sneaky, huh? And if you're reading this in years to come, 7-yo, then don't be too hard on me. You'll understand when you have a daughter of your own. Perhaps you already do. I have no idea at what stage in life you'll decide you want to look up that old-fashioned thing that your mum used to write, back in the olden days when they used to do that thing called, what was it? "blogging" or something. But in any case, I didn't need to use the clock, because by that time the girls had already had a lot of fun, and the competitive urge to stay up later at this sleepover than at any of the others had disappeared.

They all slept till 7.00am. At about 5.00am, one of them got up to use the bathroom, and I lay in bed willing her to go back to bed and to sleep, and not to assume it was morning (I'd turned the alarm clock back to the correct time by then). I don't know if it was the force of my willpower, or what, but she did. So we all got eight hours of sleep, which is good going for a sleepover. Next year, I'm thinking that 8 year olds are probably more challenging than 7 year olds on the bedtime front, so I am definitely crushing up a few Benadryl to bake into the birthday cake.

7-yo is very much into writing lists at the moment. My favourite is this one:

I hate...

mean people
pikle
brokle
wine

I hasten to add that she's only ever dunked a finger into a glass of wine for a taste. Honest. (And I was joking about the Benadryl too.) As for pikles and mean people, I don't like them much either. But personally I do like brokle. Have you worked out what that is? It took me a long while.

Wonderfully Weird Parenting: Part l

Well, it was a pony tail holder, so congrats to those of you who got it right or came close. The petals were a bit misleading, I know. Originally 5-yo had said "it's used by girls" and I, in a proper politically-correct non-gender-delimiting way, encouraged her to add in the "mostly". I pointed out that we do have a male friend (adult, not Kindergarten) who wears his hair in a pony tail, although it must be said that I haven't ever seen him wear it in a bright yellow elastic band with decorative petals.

At the wedding service of Mike and Phoebe in Friends , Mike says to Phoebe "I love the way you're so wonderfully weird", which is where I nicked the title of this series of posts from. Now I have muddled my way through all my children's preschool years, I can look back and say that mostly I have toed some kind of majority line, and gone with the prevailing flow. But there have been some things on which I have found myself out on a limb. One of the great things about mummy blogging - parent blogging, I should say - is that it gives me confidence to be a little braver than I might otherwise have been. And certainly braver in talking about it. I have learned that if I want to do something a little differently, chances are that someone else out there agrees with me. I’ve often read posts which have made me say “Ah, so it’s not just me, then”.

So I thought I’d do a little series on the ways in which I have found myself wonderfully weird, as a parent. Feel free to join in my weirdness, or to confess to your own. There’s nothing as cleansing as divulging some personal weirdness amongst friends. You should try it some time, if you haven’t already.

The first way I’m a wonderfully weird parent, is that I hate sleepovers. Who on earth invented the sleepover? You invite my child and a few others to your child’s birthday party. You are going to give them all pizza and have them watch a movie. Fine. Stop there. It’ll be 8.00pm or 9.00pm. I will come and get my child. Everyone will have a lovely time, presents will be opened, photos will be taken, and the birthday will be duly celebrated. But oh no, no, no. You insist on keeping him overnight. This means that he will go to bed at midnight. He will wake up at his usual time, or earlier, perverse though that seems. You will feed him a high-octane sugar breakfast of pancakes or waffles. Then I will collect him, and for the rest of the day, he will be intermittently grumpy, close to tears, unable to amuse himself, and will bicker with his siblings. If I suggest he is tired, he will shout “I’m NOT tired, I keep TELLING you”. The best I can hope for is to wuther through the day, get him to bed relatively early, and hope that normal service is resumed tomorrow. One day, may I just point out, is half the week-end.

So far, I have avoided sleepovers as much as possible. I have never hosted one. If given the option, I have collected the child in the evening. I have even stooped as low as quickly organizing something for the next day, to give myself a feeble mummy excuse about an early morning start. This week-end, since we have had a week of allergies, I sent along a night-time Benadryl tablet, hoping this would somehow encourage an earlier bedtime, or at least a modest lie-in. It didn’t. I have managed to sneak by on minimum sleepovers so far, but with a 5 year old daughter, I fear I am soon to enter the era of major sleepover activity.

What is this ridiculous enthusiasm for sleepovers? At best, if hosted by a family you know well, you have to endure a day on the receiving end of the behavior of an irritable toddler in the body of an older child. At worst (and this hasn’t yet happened to me, but I can imagine the dilemma it poses), if hosted by a family you don’t know well, you spend an anxious evening wondering what on earth possessed you to let your child stay in a strange house, and then you have the endurance trial the following day as well.

Does anyone share my weird hatred of sleepovers? Am I not as weird as I think on this one?