Birthday party hangover

Well, the slumber party is maybe two hours from being OVER! Yay Me! It actually went pretty well. One of the main differences from normal play dates, though, is that when she has any of these girls over to play, I usually don't know they're here. Five of them, however is a different story. You just want to beg them, Look, I know you have to scream, but could you do it in a lower register, PLEASE? PLEASE?!? But on the whole, there were almost no hurt feelings due to what-to-play disagreements. That was mostly what I had been worried about.

Around 7:00, two of Alex's friends showed up to hang out. One of them is this huge babysitter, and I think she does it because she LIKES it. She hung out on the floor with the birthday party goers and colored for, like, an hour. It was the quietest the house had been all week. I put the partyers to bed with a movie at 9:00. Choosing a movie, predictably, took about 20 minutes. I used to have a TiVo that I allowed me to burn things to dvd, so Samantha has every single Disney or Nickelodeon movie ever made from a year ago. Then there was also one lone holdout on the sleeping front, again, just as I predicted. However, I got the culprit wrong. After Samantha came to my office tearfully at 9:48 to complain that they all wanted to sleep but Jace wouldn't stop talking, I told her I'd be up to turn the T.V. off at 10:00. All in all, it was a successful party.

When the party started getting set up for bed, Alex and her friends went to her room and hung out watching T.V. Pretty soon there's a knock at the front door, the guy down the block. I let him in but told Alex they couldn't be hanging out in her bedroom anymore. So he came in and the four of them hung out in the family room downstairs, basically texting other people. I know they had fun, because they did get pretty loud once or twice. And just when I was starting to worry about kicking them out at 11:30 so we could GO TO BED, they all left around 11:00. Buckley is a pretty small town, which is allowing Alex a lot of freedom already in the 8th grade. The kids can walk across town to another kid's house, and they can stay up late and still walk down the block home. It's pretty cool. While I know it drives Eric crazy that we get a lot of kids hanging out here, I've had to have the "relax" talk already once, pointing out that if she weren't hanging out here, they'd be doing it somewhere else. At least here we know what they're up to. At one point I even heard her friend telling someone else on her phone that she were here with her friends and her friend's mom.

Anyway, we are now one hour closer to the end of the party! I can't believe I made it...