Little Reader Turns 9

This weekend we hosted our first slumber party. It was Little Reader's 9th birthday and she has been to two sleepovers at another friend's house, but this was the first time any of her friends spent the night at our house. She invited her 3 BFFs and they all came. The party started at 5PM and one of her friend's showed up on the dot. The other two didn't show up until 6 as their parents had misread the evite.

Once they had all arrived and finished the initial fits of giggles, I set them up to make T-shirts with fabric paint. I gave them the supplies and left them alone. One of their friends is known as the creative one, in no time we overheard comments praising how her shirt looked so nice, and better than theirs. I checked in periodically but the funny part was that by the time they were done each shirt represented their personalities perfectly.

I set up a seperate table for the foursome for dinner - pizza followed by ice cream cake and Nutella fudge. To drink - "cocktails" My daughters love the Welchs juices - especially mixing the white grape peach mango and the orange pineapple apple. I think it's overly sweet but I'm putting off allowing sodas as long as possible.

After dinner Little Reader opened her presents - a lava lamp, Apples to Apples game and a color your own messenger bag and panda bear. She loved them all. Once we got the little ones to bed, Little Reader and her friends played her new game and talked for a while. Finally they wanted to watch a movie and we hit the first glitch of the night. Little Reader had picked Princess Bride as her movie and despite the fact that we just bought the movie I couldn't find it. We have one of those turntable 400 disc players, but unfortunately you have to load the info yourself and for some reason this one never got labeled.  As hard as I tried I couldn't find it. We checked Netflix and found Princess Protection Program (or something like that) for them. One of them had seen it before and they all agreed on it. Demi Lovato and Selena Gomez instead of Robin Wright and Cary Elwes - no contest to me, but it was getting late and I wasn't going to fight this bunch. But in my passive aggressive way I will make sure to find it before the next sleepover ;)

The movie ended around midnight and Little Reader asked that we set up their beds.When I was a kid we slept on the floor in our sleeping bags. Little Reader had told me that their prior sleepover they had slept on sofas and beds but I assumed they all had sleeping bags. I got our pull out couch set up while my husband blewup the air mattress and told them to get their sleeping bags out and they all looked at me dumbfounded. They didn't have any. ????? Not sure why, but luckily we have a few extras due to Indian Princess. My husband and I left them and hoped that they would sleep in in the morning, especially given the time change.

No such luck, 3 of them never slept, and Little Reader came in asking for breakfast around 730 - no chance kid, see you later. 830, she and 2 of her friends were in my room. That was inappropriate (and I'll talk to her about that later). I sent them away, got up and started on homemade pancakes and bacon. 930 we had breakfast and they were all gone by 1030. Little Reader swore she wasn't tired after staying up all night, but dozed off by 1130 for 3 hours, got up had a late lunch, dozed off again, and then woke up for dinner, watched the Hawks game - they lost :( and then off to bed.

Bottom line - she had a great time and it was a very easy party.  Two years ago we had 10 kids at our house for a science party for two hours and were exhausted, this time it was 4 kids, 17 hours and pretty easy - aside from a little badgering to get breakfast started.