The past two days we’ve been in complete birthday mode for Lexi. Normally we do a family party on their actual birthday and then do a combined party the week between Emma and Lexi’s birthday at a place like Chuck E. Cheese. This year, both girls wanted separate sleepovers.
Thursday was a complete blur. Lunch was spent gathering the cake, balloons and a present that I didn’t really need since I forgot I ordered American girl stuff. I was a little wiped out before the party even started.
But it turned out to be a great evening. Lexi was ecstatic when people actually started showing up. I think she was legitimately worried people wouldn’t come.
By Friday morning I had to take a deep breath and do the whole birthday thing again but this time with 7 girls. Overnight. I kept it pretty simple as far as decorations go. Lexi wanted all her friends to watch Soul Surfer together so we made it a surfing theme. We had a cool cake made and borrowed a real surfboard and let the girls take pictures on it like they were Bethany from Soul Surfer. Between pizza, cake and presents they danced, played Twister and red rover. They finished out the night with the movie. I was feeling pretty good about this whole sleepover thing. Until the next morning.
This morning I woke to find that during the night, some of the girls had taken the pretzels, goldfish and other snacks I had out and put them on other girls as they slept and generally made a mess of all the food in the living room floor. It was so bad Emma had the cheese from the pretzel sandwiches in her ear. No one would own up to it. I kept my cool (outwardly) but gave them a full-blown “that was rude and disrespectful” speech. I think they thought I was an evil stepmother about then. Scott’s only comment to me was well, just think, if they were boys, it would have been shaving cream. I do know pranks are part of sleepovers but I wasn’t prepared to see that this morning. All is well though. We moved on and got some breakfast and they got some good play time before everyone headed out.
I can’t believe my baby girl is 7 and all the work was definitely worth seeing all her smiles.