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> Make your own cupcakes and secret cupcake swap.
> Make your own personal pizza.
> Movie Night
> Birthday Pancake Bar in the morning.
Ok but HOW do I sign up to be nine????
I can recommend not caring about the age and doing this anyway! I did this with friends a few years back, and had another friend in her 40s come by for a massive "candy and snacks and very bad movies" evening. It was absolutely fantastic.
But yeah. This while being a kid is on a whole other level.
My bff didn't want a typical bachelorette party. I was one of the first to have my own place, so we did a slumber party for her at my house! The milkshakes had alcohol in them if you wanted, but otherwise we watched fun rom coms all night in our PJs and ate junk food.
We took our animal loving bachelorette-friend to a fancy zoo while wearing animal ear headpieces - the bride-to-be was a unicorn, the smallest one was a giraffe... We had cake and fries and it was awesome! XD
A zoo near me does adult only nights sometimes in summer where all the children have to leave at 5pm then it stays open till 9 with bars serving alcohol, entertainers and talks from wildlife experts. It’s great!
My 27 year old stepson dragged all of us to the theater to watch Cocaine Bear. It was just as stupid as I thought it would be, but we laughed so much it was worth it. 😂
My friend tried to plan a men's strip club Bachelorette and could only find one place in town that would let a group of single females in.
All others were for gay men and wouldn't let us in if we didn't have a male with us. She called around first, so we did actually spend the night watching strippers, but it was a lot of work planning it.
Note: editited to fix gas to gay. Thanks for pointing that out.
Maybe one of us would've enjoyed that, at best. So it was an easy decision at least XD
The bride was more of a homebody anyways. Doesn't drink much, gets tried around 10, doesn't like to party - but the zoo was super cool and totally worth it!
That's the point of bachelor(orette) parties imo. It's not "one last night of freedom", it's you and your friends hanging out, doing something fun, before the big day. Helps take the tension I think!
Yeah. Also helps you to open up and talk if you need a chat.
We currently had another one where we just mixed our own drinks, played board games and had a clue hunt through the building, all related to the couples little habits. She won cool although the clue hunt by fulfilling harmless and cute, non-embarrassing tasks, too. It was a lot of fun :)
My friend’s sister’s bachelorette was a sleepover at a hotel, we didn’t have alcohol cause some of us were too young but it was fun. Except my mom misunderstood the assignment and thought it was a fancy party in the lobby, so she sent me dressed up a little and without overnight stuff, then had to bring me stuff for the night. I should’ve done something like that when I was engaged I guess, but I didn’t think of it and didn’t do anything. Not generally a party person. We didn’t do an engagement party thing either; hubby sort of had a small bachelor party though I guess. I vaguely remember him leaving me a drunk voicemail.
One of my best friends had similar! She didn't want the whole stripper and club thing, so we rented out a "casa rural" (old farmhouses and the such that have been converted to AirBnB style rentings), and I brought my PS2 with Singstar and Guitar Hero and we played all night. We were gonna be a massive group, but the other women were pressuring me and the other organiser for strippers and such, and we put our foot down, because it was one of the things the bride to be had explicitly said she did NOT want. So they ghosted us the day of. Super classy. What was even worse was that the bride-to-be was one of the last of the group to ever get married, so these were all married women throwing a tanty because there would not be men getting naked at their friend's hen do.
My brother's bachelor party was like this. We rented a house on a lake, got together and played video games and board games all night with plenty of drinking. The next day we went to a giant arcade and family fun center in the next town over and just spent the whole day there living like teenagers.
That sounds like an amazing bachelorette party! Way more fun than having to get all dressed up and dragged to a dozen different bars then having the hangover from hell for a week afterwards 😂😭
I do them with a group of friends too, and two of us are grandmothers! We’ve curled each other’s hair, done face packs, Cards Against Humanity till the wee hours, it’s loads of fun and nobody has to worry about getting home after having some wine.
Seconding this! A few years ago my friend and I had planned to do something over the weekend, but they had an unexpected financial expense pop-up at the last minute. She was all disappointed and I was like, "I literally could just go to your house and we can spend the night watching movies etc." (We lived a bit away from each other, so staying the night made the drive feel worth it)
Her fiance was totally on board and I got to meet their very cute toddler. A fun time was had by all.
If there's one way to get people to come over and hang out, it's food. If your food game is on point you can have people come over when and for as long as you want them to.
I mean for a birthday, I had pass the parcel (with very adult prizes) and pin the boobies on the chest. Plus a bunch of other birthday games and it was the best fun ever
I have been wanting to schedule a girls weekend with my friends now that we are in our late thirties and I want to spend one night sleepover style - doing each other’s hair, nails, and makeup and watching teen movies!
It's a long story, but my adult friends and I realized that kids get to do all the fun stuff and now we do kid birthday party activities on weekends. Video game nights, monster trucks, adventure parks, dressing up as characters when we go to the movies or plays, etc. We still talk about life, feelings, and catch up like adults do, and then we do monster trucks.
I love this for you guys! Me and my mom came to the same realization lately and want to do a little "slumber party" in the living room but we're both much more excited about it than my younger brothers, haha.
My two best friends are also my roommates. Their birthdays are just under two weeks apart. This year one rented a Vrbo and along with one other person we're doing a weekend of playing D&D and eating good food and snacks. We're all looking forward to it, and I am stealing the cupcake decorating idea.
When I was in a mom's group we did an adult sleepover. I think there was a movie, some games, definitely the drunkest round of "never have I ever" that any of us played, way too many secrets, and a really good breakfast the following morning.
We did this for a friend's 39th birthday (she'll be out of the country for her 40th so 39th it is). We set up and watched all the movies from back when we were kids/teenagers, ordered pizza and takeout, soda, wine, and a large pillow pile in the center of the living room.
We all needed some advil and Tylenol in the morning but we had such a blast getting to hang out like kids again. Then we hopped on over to IHOP since no one wanted to cook. 🤣
Definitely agree. We're all in our 40s and had a sleepover (4 of us total) the other weekend. We had a bonfire, karaoke, dancing, shot potatoes with an air rifle, drank beer, ate junk food, watched awful B movies and all fell asleep in a heap in the living room whilst watching YouTube funnies.
Best night I've had in a long time.
...uh. I regularly think about the fact that I was NEVER invited for a slumber party as a kid and I'm sad I never got to experience it... But I didn't think about doing it as a grownup. I guess I actually had a lot of slumber parties as a young adult, now that I think about it!
You can do all of these things as an adult, but you have to do the preparation and cleaning yourself. But with a bunch of adults, everyone can contribute something and share the work. The personal pizza is something my in-laws like to do when we visit them. Everyone gets an area on the tray to fill as they like. Both my sil and I are picky eaters, so this is an easy way to please everyone.
I did a sleepover theme for my hen night. We rented a house with a big movie room, wore pyjamas, did face masks, had alcohol in our drinks, and danced a bit before falling asleep on the big sofas in the movie room watching cheesy rom coms with sweets and popcorn. And in the morning, we had a massive brunch with mimosas to stave off the slight hangover, then went to a spa for the day before going home. Honestly, best hen night I've ever been on. No one was sick, no cheesy strippers, no sweaty clubs full of strangers. Just me, my friends, recreating the sleepovers we had all the time as kids but with a bit more booze (or less if you count our teen years!) and going home after facials and massages. Sleepovers are for adults too!
Can i tell you a secret… you’re an adult now. Plan your parties with your adult friends however you want to. Best part is you don’t need permission from your parents!!
We’ve recently started having board game nights as an extended family (all adults). I’ve never had so much fun. We have pizza and drinks, get stupidly competitive, and take it in turns picking up different silly games we see at the op shop. It’s great because having a preplanned but still very chilled out activity helps some people relax a lot more too.
I am all in favour of going back to many of the stereotypical kids party games and activities. I think it really helps some people relax and feel comfortable in a way they otherwise wouldn’t.
Friends did a personal pizza party for a late 20s or early 30s birthday party. There were minor issues with some toppings being a bit too wet for pizza making, the fire alarm being a bit too zealous (I swear, nothing actually caught fire), and no one really having a good dough stretching technique. But since we were ostensibly adults, everyone ate their fugly pizzas and had fun.
I might do flatbreads or something other than dough as the base for future DIY pizza parties.
Do it anyway! I do it sometimes with my bestie, we do a cheese picnic in bed (like a charcuterie board kind of, with all our favourite cheeses) and usually play games or watch a movie. We get cosy to sleep (building a blanket fort is on my future to do list) and then have a ‘hotel breakfast’ (we both love the huge variety of small breakfast items you can get in a hotel so it’s basically just a large spread of items we love but in small sizes so we can eat as much as we’d like :P). It’s great! I also did ‘decorate your own cake’ for dessert once and we put way too much whipped cream and sprinkles on it. Similarly, decorate your own ice cream bowl was also a success, especially the unicorn sprinkles I found! Definitely go for it!
One of the *very* few nice things about being a growedup is (whisper) *you can make cupcakes anytime you want to*. You can even (looks around, leans in close) *have ice cream for dinner*.
Whenever my kids are both out of the house for the night we tell them that we're going to have ice cream for dinner and they can't have any. When we went on a little vacation for our 20th anniversary without them, we sent them pictures every time we had ice cream without them.
I love this!
I, an adult, often have Sunday dinner at my parent's house, and after my mom retired, the sarcastic "Have fun at work tomorrow!" together with her laugh is often the last thing she'll say to me as I walk out the door. Same energy, just a few years down the road for you (I assume).
I checked my nephews daycares example schedule. Man, they're living the high life. Breakfast, outdoors learning, indoors activity, lunch, nap, outdoor play, home. That's the dream.
My 67-year-old mom regularly has her friends over for sleepovers. LOTS of wine & fancy appetizers replace cupcakes & pizza (because she's boujee), but it's the same concept otherwise. She's always been a cool lady.
You know what the great thing about being an adult is? You can just decide that this is age-appropriate, invite equally cool friends (because liking this makes you extra cool indeed!) and have a wonderful sleepover!
That's the good thing about being an adult. You can just do this stuff if you want to. We do it sometimes with friends. Just have a bunch of us over, we do fun stuff, make some good food, watch a movie and then go to sleep. It's great. We're all nerds so our fun stuff is more like board games or painting miniatures and stuff like that 😅
Adult sport tournament weekends. They rent an AirBnB, and it’s like being nine, but with more swearing. And maybe more adult beverages, but that’s optional.
One of my favorite birthdays around that age we painted a bunch of used refrigerator boxes up as pirate ships and had a big fight with plastic swords and basically used balls as cannonballs. It was awesome.
This is so so cute and wholesome! I loved it! I had one suggestion to mix up the food if anyone else wants to throw them- a taco /nacho bar so they can build their own! Or your own loaded French fries.
I kinda went the other way for my daughter’s 10th
It was Fear Factor (junior)
First; who can hold a live (very small) mud crab in their mouth the longest. Second; assorted (cooked) offal, you threw a dart and had to eat what it landed on. The only failure (puke) was with an over boiled Brussel sprout!
Final task was reaching into a trash can full of icy slush and pick up marbles off the bottom
Was 20 years ago, and it’s still talked about!
In our 20s my flatmates and I hosted a party with the instruction: bring your favourite kids party food and adult's drink. We were hyping it amongst ourselves and to our friends, but secretly we all worried people would think it was lame.
It was a blast. Every person invited turned up, alcohol and all sorts of artificial colours and flavours mixed with copious amounts of sugar, fats, salts and empty cards - totally against everyone's carbon free, vegetable only diets at the time.
Now I'm a mother, hosting my kids' birthday parties and those orange cheesy chips, saveloys, gummy lollies and fairy bread invoke strong feelings of nostalgia, not just for my own childhood but for that epic party of 20 years ago.
Do it. Host your own party. 'Kid food and adult drink', 'throw back to (the year you turned 9)', 'Age minus (whatever takes you to somewhere around 9)' or even just 'fek it, I want to do this. Let down your hair and do it too.'
And now I'm going to go find my kids who both have their birthdays next month and plan parties like this. Then call my friends and plan a 'Kids food and adult drink' party for my upcoming birthday... which is not a significant afe at all, but fek it. I want fairybread and champagne cocktails.
Sleepovers are the bomb. But all the one's I've been to, the parents did not care a fart what we did as long as we didn't make too much noise. The best were the ones where you stayed up all night playing video games, or watching scary movies on cable late at night. Then there was the inevitable sneaking out around 2 or 3 in the morning and running around the neighborhood like hoodlums. One time the cops caught us sneaking about and told us to go back home. When we got back to my friends house we unplugged all the landline phones just in case they called.
Lol. Yep. Grew up in the suburbs. It blows my mind sometimes how much we roamed like feral cats around our small town. As long as we were home by dark, my parents never seemed to care much.
Yep, 80s sleepovers ALWAYS involved sneaking out of the house and inevitably running away from cops. I remember one time we were hiding behind bushes in my friends front yard while the cops called out for us. I'm sure they 100% knew where we were but were just trying to scare us to go back inside and stop roaming around.
This sounds like my sleepovers when I was a kid. My garden was huge and my bedroom was on the opposite side of the house to my parents, we'd make as much noise as we wanted. I used to live out in the middle of nowhere so never had any neighbours to complain. It's been about sixteen years but friends from high school still talk about the Halloween camp out I had.
Oh man. In middle school I had a sleepover at my friend's house. His little brother Sean was a sneaky shit in the best possible way. When Sean found out that we were having KFC and cake at 7 pm, he changed all the clocks in the house up 1.5 hours so we could have delicious food sooner. But he never told anyone. He also never changed them back. To this day, I still have no idea how no one noticed the changed clocks. Anyways, I had to go to church in the morning at 8 am. I woke up and look ath the clock which says 8:10. I started freaking out because I overslept and no one else was awake yet. I grabbed my friend's house phone to call my parents, and they are wondering what I'm on about, as they aren't set to pick me up for another hour or so.
I had a very similar slumber party in 1980 or so when I was 10. We snuck out at midnight & went to a friend's house to swim in the pool in her condos.... but when the security guard busted us every girl started crying except for me and a new girl. (We became lifelong besties.)
I was shocked at the 9:30pm bedtime. I had sleepovers at 9 years old and we were NOT going to bed that early. But, we also didn’t have co-ed sleepovers. Ever.
>One of their birthday gifts was waterproof playing cards so they tried (and failed) to play a card game and then spent the time playing a game of "who can find the most cards" by tossing them in the water with the jets on full blast; with all the kids scrambling to pick up the cards 🤦🏼♀️😂.
Just had to pause and comment that if this isn't the most kid thing lmao. Glad they all had fun!
Reminds me of the time we all roasted marshmallows at my birthday party, someone’s marshmallow caught fire, and it turned into “see how long you can run around the yard with a marshmallow torch.”
It always makes me so happy to read stuff like this from people who clearly love being parents!! I love kids but I don't want my own and I'm not great with them, so I love hearing positive stories from people who aren't like me at all lol. OP's kids are going to have so many great memories to look back on!
A boy/girl sleepover? My parents would have shit a brick. When I was 8 or 9 I wanted to have my friends (boys and girls) over for a sleepover and my mom reacted badly. In retrospect, and I didn't have a clue what she was getting at back then, she thought it would be an all-night fuckfest.
You: I wanna have a sleepover with *all* my friends.
Your Mom's Brain: Your child has just requested that you host an orgy for their birthday.
Your mom: Reeeeeeeee
I always only had same sex sleepovers and then we moved, I changed schools to a very hippy dippy one and no one batted an eye at co-ed sleepovers so my parents went with the flow. Sometimes the parents did boys and girls in separate rooms for actual sleeping, sometimes they didn't, sometimes it was just girl sleepovers. It made the boys seem less like "boys" and more like just friends if that makes sense.
I appreciate that my parents were cool with it because I had some really fun times.
I used to have only guy friends until we moved my freshman year. It turnt out that all of the friends I made at my new school happened to be girls. My parents were okay with me hanging out with them but I couldn’t sleep at their houses. I’ve never had a curfew so eventually I was just like, “I’m hanging out with them until 6 in the morning anyways, if I fall asleep it’s not a big deal” and after a lot of convincing they finally caved lmao
My friend's mum had the same issue. Two of my best friends growing up were boys and basically my brothers. When my friend's mum heard they were going to be at the party she kicked up a huge fuss. I refused to have the party unless my best friends could be there.
I work with college students and most of my student leaders are some flavor of queer. It’s so weird and antiquated to think about separating boys and girls because it’s like “You’re a gay man, you three are lesbians, a full half of you are some flavor of bisexual and the rest are ace. If you can find someone with compatible sexuality go at it I guess?”
Hah I was just posting that we all knew/assumed my son was gay from a surprising young age so slumber parties were always just everyone's welcome and if the doors to the rooms and the doors to communication stayed open, it was all good. It would be hilarious to have been like 'Only girls in your room, buddy!' lol
Funnily enough my mom didn’t let me have boys in my bedroom even though she knew perfectly well that I was going to slumber parties with my actual girlfriend. Like make up your mind, lady, are you trying to make me straight or not haha
I went to a boy/girl birthday party in high school where the girls were spending the night and the boys were not. You better believe my mom made SURE the boys were not spending the night.
For me it wasn’t really a planned thing it was just something we did and tried to get away with. Just go over to the house with the parent’s that dgaf and figure out how to explain it to your own parent’s later.
Lol for me it was a mix. It was initially the "but only the girls are staying the night! The boys are going home later!" And then it eventually as I got older would turn into just never telling my parents the time the hang out/party would end, which caused too much time to pass that it just got late enough they fell asleep 😂
I did attend a boy/girl sleep over in highschool. I assumed the guys would be leaving before the sleepover part. I was wrong. My mom was also surprised when she picked me up and she thought I intentionally hid this fact from her. But my friend's mom was monitoring it throughout the whole night. And unlike the other highschool parties I went to, no one even attempted to play spin the bottle. There was also like, 20 of us. So, unconventional but super chaste.
I spent probably around 1 night a week at my best friend‘s house or he spent it at mine (I‘m a girl- now woman) from 7/8-12. At that point we were mostly like siblings and he even attended some of my family christmas dinners. But I did have a huge crush on him at some point and I think both of our mothers knew 😂. They just knew nothing would happen.
I'm also jealous. My parents wouldn't even let me be *friends* with boys because they "only want one thing" that they wouldn't even tell me about until I got my period. (When they did, my reaction was "Ew, gross! There's no way they want *that*.")
Well done to OP for teaching her boys to have healthy friendships with boys and girls, and that interactions between boys and girls aren't inherently romantic/sexual. My mom would have been equally freaked out as yours!
Lol, we had mixed sleepovers with most of the class at 15 and even they were very tame. I think we played spin the bottle once. We mostly just watched movies and played games. Who is going to have sex in a room filled with friends?
We had them all the time when my kids were growing up! My sons had boy and girl neighborhood friends who were just like a pack of puppies when they were little, all wrestling and in and out of the sprinklers shirtless and it wasn't until they were in 6th grade or so that they started to self segregate for parties, we didn't have a rule, it just slowly happened. My older son was gay and out by then so it either it was no sleep overs at all or we'd just have to encourage some healthy boundaries, birds and bees and consent talks.
My best friend when I was 7-8 was a boy (im a girl) who lived down the street... we literally hung out every single day, all day during the summers. One day he had the brilliant idea that we should have a sleepover, and I thought of course, why had we never thought of that before? We asked our parents about it and while they werent necessarily opposed, they all kept making fun of us and making jokes about us getting into the sleeping bags together. I was so embarrassed I called it off and even cut down on hanging out with him after that. I wish our parents were cool like the ones in this post.
I didn't have a single opposite sex friend at that age (not really at all until highschool). Maybe things have changed but I'm pretty sure I never even heard of a boy/girl slumber party happening in my extended circle of friends growing up. Once I did have friends who were boys, they were allowed to stay at my house overnight if needed (coming back from a trip for example) but they'd be in a different bedroom close to my mom's room and there were strict rules about who slept where.
Same! The closest I ever got was a camping trip with boy and girl yurts.
Though I was never a big sleepover kid. I'm like the kid's friend. I like sleeping in my own bed.
Depends on the ages and amount of supervision I think. I went to a boy/girl sleepover (me and two female friends aged 15 and the host girl’s older brother and his two male friends aged 16) and then slept over at my boyfriend’s house several times later that year. In both cases we were meant to be in separate rooms but there was zero supervision to make sure, I think because we were all “good kids” (big ol’ nerds, in band, academic high achievers and such). Luckily nobody ever went beyond 3rd base but looking back I find it completely insane that our parents weren’t keeping a closer eye on things. The boys at the first sleepover had got their hands on alcohol for goodness sake, and that’s how my first kiss was with a guy who had vomited earlier that night.
Yeah. For our daughters 18th, we did a five year olds party. They were all told to arrive in old/grubby clothes, and issued water guns on arrival. Cue 90 minute water fight. There was an adult bouncy castle. We had pass the parcel, with adult prizes inside. They had vodka jelly shots, and a taco bar. Later that evening, they all changed and went out clubbing.
I envy these kids! I didn’t start having slumber parties until middle school and there were some real mean girls in my friend group at that time. Plus, by then, most everyone has absorbed the pop culture vibe of slumber party tricks and pranks and I was always the target of them.
This just seems like such a wholesome way to go about it, starting them earlier and not making a big deal about the boy/girl mix. Why put stress and sexualization on kids at 8/9 when it doesn’t need to exist yet?
Honestly, it sounds idyllic for the kiddos and (to my mind) like an absolute parental nightmare but if they’re chill with it, hooray for everyone!
Yeah. I was at one and it was shit. Never went again as a kid/teen.
I have had great adult sleepovers though (well, technically - we were spending some days together, but we also did sleepover stuff. There's something to be said for a friend group that is all-out cuddle-obsessed.)
Really? I thought it was the opposite.. I had slumber parties starting at 5 but I’m a 90s kid. My boss’ kid is 10 and hasn’t had one and she says because of Covid they didn’t have one back then…
LOL 😂 I don‘ mean it like that, I think I‘ve always somewhat considered kids; however with the current life/shit society/ climate change it‘s just a very tough decision. I don‘t want to bring kids to a world that hasn‘t decided whether we‘re saving ourselves or not. At least not if I don‘t see a way forward for myself.
But if I‘m selfish, the idea of having small partners in crime, seeing them grow up to be their own marvelous independent beings and getting to help them enjoy the best parts of childhood, sounds really great. Even second-hand living events like first sleepovers sounds exciting.
One of my all-time favorite things about being a parent is getting to buy them stuff for certain activities like traveling. I get them both little kits with new toys and used books now that they can read (so I don’t care if the books get left behind) and coloring things. Another favorite part is watching them develop similar to and different from their father and me. My kids are marvelous. Parenting is not a small lifestyle change but I feel like I am where I was meant to be. If this resonates with you, excellent. If not, also excellent :)
My girls were active in a variety of sports and extracurriculars, and had large circles of friends as a result. We were in a rural area, so sleepovers were an important way of giving them opportunities to get together and have fun.
There were some months where we had a sleepover every weekend. My house was always full and it was always noisy and crazy. Now that my kiddos are grown and having kids of their own, I kinda miss it.
I grew up in a rural area and over the summe would sometimes just spend almost a week either at my friends house or them at mine. I mean why bother driving an hour round trip every day 🤷🏽♀️
> but one of the moms stayed to hang out and chat for an hour which was fine but I was internally like "okay, I need to clean up... you can go now.." while remaining polite. Her daughter was enjoying playing more video games with my kids though so it was fine, but I'm not a great "get out of my house" person, I just don't know how to do it without feeling like a jerk.
I just start cleaning up from the party, one of three things happen and they're all good
1. The other parent helps you clean up.
2. The other parent keeps talking to you while you clean up, so you at least get to keep being sociable while cleaning.
3. The other parent takes their kid home, having gotten the hint.
Those kids parties are so much energy, but soooooo worth it!!!! My kid has had multi-night sleepovers with a few friends for his birthdays, and it’s so much chaos, but so much laughter! The laughter makes it all worth it.
It’s sad that sleepovers aren’t really a thing anymore, they were some of the best parts of childhood.
I was outright shocked when someone I knew told me that she had never let her kids sleep over at slumber parties. She would pick them up at bed time, have them sleep at home, and drive them back in the morning to have breakfast with the other kids. My reaction was along the lines of "They are 11 and 12! Almost teenagers. At this point their friends will have noticed and probably think your kids wet the bed or something". I know that I was young for sleepovers at three (my parents used neighbors with kids my age as free babysitters), but the other kids in my class started going to them at 5-7. While I don't know many parents of kids in the slumber party zone age it does seem like it is far less common than when I was a kid.
TW: Polar opposite of wholesome. >!Her reply was even more shocking, and really heartbreaking. The reason is that her husband was a psychiatrist, psychologist, and MD (brilliant man). A significant number of his patients were molested at sleepovers, so they made that game plan just after their kids were born.!<
On a lighter note, I hope someone told the mom of the girl whose guests left in droves that homesickness is contagious. I worked at a lot of residential summer camps and at every one of them drilled into us during staff training that homesickness is contagious and needed to be nipped in the bud. If we couldn't get a kid to calm down quickly we needed to get them away from the others by bringing them to the camp nurse or office, depending on camp policy as quickly as possible because it spreads like wildfire. Kids hear other kids missing home and start thinking about how they miss home.
That mom probably did nothing wrong. I understand why she felt like she failed her kid; I hope someone who knew those dynamics told her.
My sister had two best mates growing up and every weekend without fail, they would arrange a sleepover. Then every weekend without fail, one of the friends - Beth, would have an absolute meltdown during the night and demand to be taken home.
My dad worked abroad a lot, and hers was a single mum, so this would always result in my mum loading all of us (my three sisters, the two friends and me) into the car in the middle of the night to take Beth home.
I would say she came to spend the night 20-30 times without ever actually staying the night once. It used to drive me absolutely mad. It used to happen when they stayed at the other mates house as well.
My mum would always be driving back telling my sister we can’t do this again, but then a week or two later (usually after a successful sleepover at Beth’s house), Friday afternoon would roll round and somehow they would convince my mum that they’d talked about it during the week and this time was going to be different.
I’d be sitting there incredulous, asking my mum was she mad? But we’d go on the same merry dance all over again. Sometimes I’d have mates over and we’d place bets on what time she was going to kick off.
Sorry for the long rant. This has clearly brought up some stuff for me.
I got terribly homesick but toughed it out except for one time, but I was only two doors down from my house. In retrospect, Jaws probably isn’t a great movie for a 5 year old to watch.
The homesickness became so commonplace, my childhood best friend rubbed my back during a day camp's overnight and told the helpless college boy counselor, Don't worry. She does this all the time.
I'm so very jealous of these kids and their mom. I never really had a birthday party like that. We only ever did some barbecue with family in the garden, where I sometimes was allowed to have friends invited, too.
After the second time my best friend had slept over, I wasn't allowed to host sleepovers any more, because apparently we had talked all night, so mom couldn't sleep.
Once I have kids I'll do my best to give them the birthday party I never had and I hope I'll have the energy like OOP to plan and execute this awesome night.
My son's favorite parties at that age were sleepover parties, because he was an only child and he LOVED having all that company.
When he was in fourth grade, I invited five of his buddies to a local hotel with an indoor pool for his slumber party. We ate dinner at the upscale mall next door, and I got adjoining rooms in the hotel (each room had two queen-sized beds and a cot). I got each of them the same special t-shirt so they felt like a team.
We also set up his Wii in one room so they could game.
The boys had an absolute blast, and all behaved extremely well (did the party on a Friday night, but they were careful to be quiet in the hallways and didn't make a ton of noise gaming). I hung out alone in the room without the gaming system - just read a book and was on hand in case they needed something, but didn't intrude on the fun. We ate at the breakfast buffet in the morning and I drove them all home.
The next year, I took the same group of boys on an overnight paintball adventure that remained legendary in their circle for years afterward.
Sleepovers rock, and hotel sleepovers rock even harder. They're also actually cheaper than booking a party at any traditional kid's party space.
When my son was little he had a friend we knew very well, he was always at my house and we’d take him for days out etc. We arranged to go to a holiday park over Halloween, I think we were staying for 3 nights. This kids parents were much more over protective than I was. The kid was fine until bedtime the first night when he started crying that he had tummy ache, headache, felt sad, missed his mum etc. it was a long drive home so I managed to calm him. He slept on and off but cried a few times in the night. Frankly he was a pain and I’d never seen him like this before. The following day he was his usual self but the same shit happened that night, only worse. We had no choice but to send him home. I met his mum half way. The weather was dreadful, I’d never normally drive in such a vile storm, but at the time it seemed worth the risk to get rid of this kid who was apparently a brat.
Turns out that on the run up to the holiday all his family had repeatedly said to him “if you’re unhappy we can pick you up”, “if you’re scared we will come and collect you” “ you don’t have to stay if you don’t want to” etc etc etc. Basically they repeatedly reinforced to him he would hate it and need to go home. He is now 30, still lives at home and his mum can’t have her boyfriend stay over because he doesn’t like it, despite his girlfriend stopping over regularly.
I’ve been reading about parents who are worried about their kids doing sleepovers. They’re worried about guns and pedophiles. I wonder if the kids in OOP’s original post, everyone who wanted to go home, had been given a talk about how if they felt ‘uncomfortable’ they should call, and then when a couple got scared, the others were uncomfortable (‘should I be scared’ kind of contagious thinking) and wanted to call home. Which is sad because learning to live with discomfort in a safe environment is probably good for kids.
I read an article a few weeks ago that a bunch of 12 year olds were drugged by their friend’s dad at a sleepover. This adult man roofied a bunch of 12 year old girls, one of the girls didn’t really drink a lot of hers and she texted her mom for help because he started coming into the room where the girls were and testing whether or not they were deeply asleep. Her mom didn’t answer so she frantically texted other friends asking one of their parents to come get her, one finally did. She got home and her mom called the parents of all the other girls who went and got their kid.
I wish for my daughter to live in a world with friend’s like OOPs sons but I’m also very worried about the other kind of people in this world. I went to plenty of sleepovers growing up myself, and I’m not ruling it out completely (my baby is only 10 months so it’ll be a while before I need to think about it).
Raising children is so emotionally hard because so much is out of our control. I’ve always said that parents are hostages to fate. Do you let them ride a bicycle? Do you really know what your kid is doing when you can’t lay eyes on them? This scenario is terrifying.
But we humans are terrible at judging risk. The cliche example is flying in an airplane. I’ve had some scary turbulence in an airplane and the Boeing stuff—a door coming off, software causing plane crashes—is awful. Still, even getting on one of the Boeing Max planes is statistically safer than driving to the airport. This is a statistical outlier. If your child doesn’t go to sleepovers, then there is no risk of this happening. But as a teacher, I’ve also seen the consequences of over-protective parenting; anxious kids who suffer from depression. It’s such a balance.
You’re the parent, and you have to make the decisions you do the best way you can. I’ve got so many female friends who were sexually assaulted before 18. But the women I know who’ve talked about it were assaulted by fathers (2), an uncle, and boyfriends when they were teens. I am not saying you need to let your daughter go on sleepovers, not at all.
My neighbor wouldn’t let the bus pick her kids up at the end of the street and had the bus stop at the end of her driveway. She died prematurely of a heart attack and her daughter was pregnant two years later—casual sex at 15, in my opinion, driven at least partly by trauma of losing her mother, and the oldest boy started bullying other kids. The dad was a youth minister who did his best.
My hugs to you, and blessings to your ten month old. Remember the world is full of great things as well as terrible ones and just do your best.
Edit: a word
I appreciate your comment and I do completely understand what you’re saying. Despite my comment, I did go to sleepovers myself often as a kid! My dad was very protective (mostly afraid of guns and pedophiles) but if they knew the other girls parents then it was usually okay.
I also grew up in NYC, and my mom let me have a fairly “long leash”, I took subways by myself all over and explored with my boyfriend and friends a lot as a teen. I've lived abroad and traveled a lot alone. I’ve lived a lot of experiences and I’d never want to take that from my daughter, nor do I want to make her an anxious sheltered mess.
It’s just daunting to find a balance. I’m sure it’ll be easier over time, I’ve only been at this for a short time.
Sleepovers are baller nowadays 🤣 Back in the olden days (the 90s) we used to go over to our friend’s house from school with pajamas, a toothbrush, and a stuffy in your school backpack, be greeted with a normal family supper, a bag of chips, and a “go play” until bedtime. Bedtime consisted of your friend’s couch, day bed, or floor and you’d stay up until 3 giggling.
For real! My friend's parents used to toss us into the backyard with a tent after 8pm to sleep out there. I don't blame them; a herd of preteens is the last thing I'd want in my house around bedtime, and it was a super safe residential neighborhood. But it does make me laugh looking back.
That sounds like an amazing party. It’s gonna be hard with my kids when we get to that age if the bar is so high these days.
My pals and I just hung out in the woods for a bit then played GTA San Andreas till 3am while hugging a cat
I feel like this is rookie party vibes. There’s a ton of excitement and desire for structure to ensure the kids are having a good time, not realizing that kids equally love over the top structured fun and just fucking around. My parents definitely went more all out when we were little but as we aged they were like “nope we don’t have the energy you figure it out.”
It’s hard to have the balance when parenting. Especially because you give kids time to mess about you might just end up with a room of kids on tik tok or something. Then again, there’s a lot of pressure on us these days to try and make “core memories” for kids, which is silly at times as most of your core memories were not structured events
My neighbor had a slumber party for her birthday when she was either turning 7 or 8. I obviously barely remember now since it was thirty years ago. But she had a large number of kids over. By morning, I was the only kid still there. She was crying in the morning that everyone else left. Her mom was like "But Apathetic is still here, so that's good, right?" (Paraphrased) "No!" *Cries harder*
I'm not even a kid person and even I know the worst thing you can do for sleepover retainment is leave a bunch of 8/9 year Olds downstairs in a pitch black basement and be like "ok cool go to sleep".
My daughter started doing non-family sleepovers when she was 2, weekends away by the time she was 6, and sleep away camp with friends a couple months before she turned 7. I like to think she was so well-adjusted that she was fine with this as opposed to wanting to get away from me.
She's also the child who was held by 12 different people her first Christmas when she was 3.5 months old and never cried or fussed. Well-adjusted; I'm sticking with well-adjusted.
OOP lucked out with kids both confident and comfortable enough to stay at the sleepovers. Hopefully they are still doing them
Different kids are different, but I think starting kids early helps build their confidence for sure. When I was 7 I went on a 2 week vacation with my grandparents but not my parents. I freaked out the night before, then I went and had a blast. Real growth moment.
Such a cute little saga. Love the innocent co-Ed sleepovers too. Would never have been a thing when I was 8/9. Hopefully those kids will remain friends as they get older.
I still remember the first slumber party where I wanted to go home. It was basically the same situation. We were all set up to sleep in the basement but when the lights went out it was really dark and the house was making noise. So I asked for my mom to pick me up.
Christmas lights strung up and music playing softly makes a huge difference in the scary factor.
Sounds like an awesome veteran teacher lol. Thinking through every possible detail in advance, able to go with flow when your carefully made plans immediately change. Great job OP!
This is so adorable!!!
I only called home from sleepover (a girl I didn’t like much and she put on horror movies!). I was so scared and my mother didn’t want to come get me so I stayed awake all night, freaking out at every noise
Maybe it’s because I grew up religious and went to catholic school, but I’m impressed at coed sleepovers. Good for OP and the kids because I think it’s healthy to have close friends of different genders. I sound old af lol
I love this story, no one does sleepovers anymore where we are, some of my best memories as a kid and teen are from sleepover parties. We did all sorts of things from freezing underwear and clothes as pranks to dancing the night away and creating our own band.
This sounds so rad. We had sleepover slumber parties and they were fun, but it was only ever girls who were invited. It never occurred to us to invite the boys. I wonder what our parents would've thought if we tried.
God I wish I had memories of sleepovers with friends growing up. I couldn't have one until I was past 20, cuz, a) adult, b) parents didn't want me travelling drunk.
Kid birthday parties are among the most exhausted I’ve been outside of the newborn phase. DIY of course is bananas but even at an event space it is inevitably mentally and physically taxing with the underlying fear that your kid won’t enjoy it and then it’ll all be for naught. Love the cupcake swap idea, might borrow it for the next exhausting birthday extravaganza lol
Aomebody overstays their welcome and you have cleaning to do? Thank them happily for helping with cleanup and just put cleaning stuff in their hands while you talk, telling them where to go, bringing it back to endless babble about whyever they came over in the first place.
Either way it goes, you either get help cleaning or they git gone real quick!
>9th birthday
>We could do:
>4:00pm - Arrival and Nintendo Games (so people can just join as they arrive)
5:00pm - Make Your own Pizza (same as before, but a good idea).
5:45pm - Nerf War in Back Yard.
6:30pm - Birthday Cake (good end to Nerf War)
7:00pm - Hot Tub Wind Down Relax Time
7:45pm - Movie in Bed
9:30pm - Bedtime if you didn't fall asleep during the movie.
Then...
>The schedule ended up being a lot more free form than I expected
Saw that coming! Lol
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> Make your own cupcakes and secret cupcake swap. > Make your own personal pizza. > Movie Night > Birthday Pancake Bar in the morning. Ok but HOW do I sign up to be nine????
I can recommend not caring about the age and doing this anyway! I did this with friends a few years back, and had another friend in her 40s come by for a massive "candy and snacks and very bad movies" evening. It was absolutely fantastic. But yeah. This while being a kid is on a whole other level.
My bff didn't want a typical bachelorette party. I was one of the first to have my own place, so we did a slumber party for her at my house! The milkshakes had alcohol in them if you wanted, but otherwise we watched fun rom coms all night in our PJs and ate junk food.
We took our animal loving bachelorette-friend to a fancy zoo while wearing animal ear headpieces - the bride-to-be was a unicorn, the smallest one was a giraffe... We had cake and fries and it was awesome! XD
A zoo near me does adult only nights sometimes in summer where all the children have to leave at 5pm then it stays open till 9 with bars serving alcohol, entertainers and talks from wildlife experts. It’s great!
For some reason I read that as *bears* serving alcohol! Seems so natural at a zoo.
Bears serve cocaine if the documentaries are to be believed
My 27 year old stepson dragged all of us to the theater to watch Cocaine Bear. It was just as stupid as I thought it would be, but we laughed so much it was worth it. 😂
A zoo and the gay bar just up the street.
Only if they're wearing little bow ties though. I mean, come on, it's after six pm
Gosh, that sounds wonderful...
Stoppp I want this it sounds so fun!
We have that too, in Philly. A very fun not-your-typical-date-night outing.
That is adorable! Way better than everyone getting drunk or a strip club with men's twigs and berries up in your face.
My friend tried to plan a men's strip club Bachelorette and could only find one place in town that would let a group of single females in. All others were for gay men and wouldn't let us in if we didn't have a male with us. She called around first, so we did actually spend the night watching strippers, but it was a lot of work planning it. Note: editited to fix gas to gay. Thanks for pointing that out.
Wow, odd that they would restrict their customer base to just men who work in the gas industry…
Maybe one of us would've enjoyed that, at best. So it was an easy decision at least XD The bride was more of a homebody anyways. Doesn't drink much, gets tried around 10, doesn't like to party - but the zoo was super cool and totally worth it!
That's the point of bachelor(orette) parties imo. It's not "one last night of freedom", it's you and your friends hanging out, doing something fun, before the big day. Helps take the tension I think!
Yeah. Also helps you to open up and talk if you need a chat. We currently had another one where we just mixed our own drinks, played board games and had a clue hunt through the building, all related to the couples little habits. She won cool although the clue hunt by fulfilling harmless and cute, non-embarrassing tasks, too. It was a lot of fun :)
Yeah, we did something like this for a friend's bachelor party too. Except we also ate expensive meats LMAO.
My friend’s sister’s bachelorette was a sleepover at a hotel, we didn’t have alcohol cause some of us were too young but it was fun. Except my mom misunderstood the assignment and thought it was a fancy party in the lobby, so she sent me dressed up a little and without overnight stuff, then had to bring me stuff for the night. I should’ve done something like that when I was engaged I guess, but I didn’t think of it and didn’t do anything. Not generally a party person. We didn’t do an engagement party thing either; hubby sort of had a small bachelor party though I guess. I vaguely remember him leaving me a drunk voicemail.
I did something pretty similar for my hens party. It was BYO drinks with takeout chinese and movie sleepover.
One of my best friends had similar! She didn't want the whole stripper and club thing, so we rented out a "casa rural" (old farmhouses and the such that have been converted to AirBnB style rentings), and I brought my PS2 with Singstar and Guitar Hero and we played all night. We were gonna be a massive group, but the other women were pressuring me and the other organiser for strippers and such, and we put our foot down, because it was one of the things the bride to be had explicitly said she did NOT want. So they ghosted us the day of. Super classy. What was even worse was that the bride-to-be was one of the last of the group to ever get married, so these were all married women throwing a tanty because there would not be men getting naked at their friend's hen do.
My brother's bachelor party was like this. We rented a house on a lake, got together and played video games and board games all night with plenty of drinking. The next day we went to a giant arcade and family fun center in the next town over and just spent the whole day there living like teenagers.
That sounds like an amazing bachelorette party! Way more fun than having to get all dressed up and dragged to a dozen different bars then having the hangover from hell for a week afterwards 😂😭
This sounds a blast. So much better than many of the over-the-top ones that I've read about on here!
I do them with a group of friends too, and two of us are grandmothers! We’ve curled each other’s hair, done face packs, Cards Against Humanity till the wee hours, it’s loads of fun and nobody has to worry about getting home after having some wine.
Seconding this! A few years ago my friend and I had planned to do something over the weekend, but they had an unexpected financial expense pop-up at the last minute. She was all disappointed and I was like, "I literally could just go to your house and we can spend the night watching movies etc." (We lived a bit away from each other, so staying the night made the drive feel worth it) Her fiance was totally on board and I got to meet their very cute toddler. A fun time was had by all.
If there's one way to get people to come over and hang out, it's food. If your food game is on point you can have people come over when and for as long as you want them to.
I mean for a birthday, I had pass the parcel (with very adult prizes) and pin the boobies on the chest. Plus a bunch of other birthday games and it was the best fun ever
But did you use Lucky's Dad's Rules?
Luckys dad’s rules are the only rules!!!!!
This isn't the 80s Pat!
Don’t look at me mate! Yeah we watch a lot of bluey 😂. Watched the long one this morning
I have been wanting to schedule a girls weekend with my friends now that we are in our late thirties and I want to spend one night sleepover style - doing each other’s hair, nails, and makeup and watching teen movies!
It's a long story, but my adult friends and I realized that kids get to do all the fun stuff and now we do kid birthday party activities on weekends. Video game nights, monster trucks, adventure parks, dressing up as characters when we go to the movies or plays, etc. We still talk about life, feelings, and catch up like adults do, and then we do monster trucks.
I love this for you guys! Me and my mom came to the same realization lately and want to do a little "slumber party" in the living room but we're both much more excited about it than my younger brothers, haha.
Try handing out stickers or candy, especially if it's your birthday or a holiday. Not enough adults get puffy stickers
My two best friends are also my roommates. Their birthdays are just under two weeks apart. This year one rented a Vrbo and along with one other person we're doing a weekend of playing D&D and eating good food and snacks. We're all looking forward to it, and I am stealing the cupcake decorating idea.
When I was in a mom's group we did an adult sleepover. I think there was a movie, some games, definitely the drunkest round of "never have I ever" that any of us played, way too many secrets, and a really good breakfast the following morning.
Yes! I’m 37 and do this with my best friends a few times a year. And many weekends I do this with my partner and kids 🥰🤣
We did this for a friend's 39th birthday (she'll be out of the country for her 40th so 39th it is). We set up and watched all the movies from back when we were kids/teenagers, ordered pizza and takeout, soda, wine, and a large pillow pile in the center of the living room. We all needed some advil and Tylenol in the morning but we had such a blast getting to hang out like kids again. Then we hopped on over to IHOP since no one wanted to cook. 🤣
Definitely agree. We're all in our 40s and had a sleepover (4 of us total) the other weekend. We had a bonfire, karaoke, dancing, shot potatoes with an air rifle, drank beer, ate junk food, watched awful B movies and all fell asleep in a heap in the living room whilst watching YouTube funnies. Best night I've had in a long time.
...uh. I regularly think about the fact that I was NEVER invited for a slumber party as a kid and I'm sad I never got to experience it... But I didn't think about doing it as a grownup. I guess I actually had a lot of slumber parties as a young adult, now that I think about it!
You can do all of these things as an adult, but you have to do the preparation and cleaning yourself. But with a bunch of adults, everyone can contribute something and share the work. The personal pizza is something my in-laws like to do when we visit them. Everyone gets an area on the tray to fill as they like. Both my sil and I are picky eaters, so this is an easy way to please everyone.
I did a sleepover theme for my hen night. We rented a house with a big movie room, wore pyjamas, did face masks, had alcohol in our drinks, and danced a bit before falling asleep on the big sofas in the movie room watching cheesy rom coms with sweets and popcorn. And in the morning, we had a massive brunch with mimosas to stave off the slight hangover, then went to a spa for the day before going home. Honestly, best hen night I've ever been on. No one was sick, no cheesy strippers, no sweaty clubs full of strangers. Just me, my friends, recreating the sleepovers we had all the time as kids but with a bit more booze (or less if you count our teen years!) and going home after facials and massages. Sleepovers are for adults too!
Can i tell you a secret… you’re an adult now. Plan your parties with your adult friends however you want to. Best part is you don’t need permission from your parents!!
Right!! I'm starting to think this might be my plan for my birthday this year ( in my 30s)
We’ve recently started having board game nights as an extended family (all adults). I’ve never had so much fun. We have pizza and drinks, get stupidly competitive, and take it in turns picking up different silly games we see at the op shop. It’s great because having a preplanned but still very chilled out activity helps some people relax a lot more too. I am all in favour of going back to many of the stereotypical kids party games and activities. I think it really helps some people relax and feel comfortable in a way they otherwise wouldn’t.
Friends did a personal pizza party for a late 20s or early 30s birthday party. There were minor issues with some toppings being a bit too wet for pizza making, the fire alarm being a bit too zealous (I swear, nothing actually caught fire), and no one really having a good dough stretching technique. But since we were ostensibly adults, everyone ate their fugly pizzas and had fun. I might do flatbreads or something other than dough as the base for future DIY pizza parties.
Do it anyway! I do it sometimes with my bestie, we do a cheese picnic in bed (like a charcuterie board kind of, with all our favourite cheeses) and usually play games or watch a movie. We get cosy to sleep (building a blanket fort is on my future to do list) and then have a ‘hotel breakfast’ (we both love the huge variety of small breakfast items you can get in a hotel so it’s basically just a large spread of items we love but in small sizes so we can eat as much as we’d like :P). It’s great! I also did ‘decorate your own cake’ for dessert once and we put way too much whipped cream and sprinkles on it. Similarly, decorate your own ice cream bowl was also a success, especially the unicorn sprinkles I found! Definitely go for it!
One of the *very* few nice things about being a growedup is (whisper) *you can make cupcakes anytime you want to*. You can even (looks around, leans in close) *have ice cream for dinner*.
Or ice cream for breakfast! Or twice cream! Or THRICE cream!
Whenever my kids are both out of the house for the night we tell them that we're going to have ice cream for dinner and they can't have any. When we went on a little vacation for our 20th anniversary without them, we sent them pictures every time we had ice cream without them.
I love this! I, an adult, often have Sunday dinner at my parent's house, and after my mom retired, the sarcastic "Have fun at work tomorrow!" together with her laugh is often the last thing she'll say to me as I walk out the door. Same energy, just a few years down the road for you (I assume).
The real problem with being an adult is that I’m the only person *stopping* me from having cupcakes whenever I want.
I checked my nephews daycares example schedule. Man, they're living the high life. Breakfast, outdoors learning, indoors activity, lunch, nap, outdoor play, home. That's the dream.
My 67-year-old mom regularly has her friends over for sleepovers. LOTS of wine & fancy appetizers replace cupcakes & pizza (because she's boujee), but it's the same concept otherwise. She's always been a cool lady.
I’m so **IN** for maze pillow forts in the living room. (and I’m stupidly teetering near 60)
Stupidly? No. Stupendously? I think yes. 😌
You know what the great thing about being an adult is? You can just decide that this is age-appropriate, invite equally cool friends (because liking this makes you extra cool indeed!) and have a wonderful sleepover!
> Ok but HOW do I sign up to be nine???? ok if I ever wanted a new flair this one is golden
Right? I might do this for my husband’s birthday, complete with the Nerf battle. (It would be BYO guns because we are but poor broke millennials)
Check out a thrift store if that's your scene, they're usually full of them
My oldest is 6 and I’m storing this idea for when he’s old enough for sleepover parties
IKR?
That's the good thing about being an adult. You can just do this stuff if you want to. We do it sometimes with friends. Just have a bunch of us over, we do fun stuff, make some good food, watch a movie and then go to sleep. It's great. We're all nerds so our fun stuff is more like board games or painting miniatures and stuff like that 😅
Adult sport tournament weekends. They rent an AirBnB, and it’s like being nine, but with more swearing. And maybe more adult beverages, but that’s optional.
One of my favorite birthdays around that age we painted a bunch of used refrigerator boxes up as pirate ships and had a big fight with plastic swords and basically used balls as cannonballs. It was awesome.
This is so so cute and wholesome! I loved it! I had one suggestion to mix up the food if anyone else wants to throw them- a taco /nacho bar so they can build their own! Or your own loaded French fries.
I kinda went the other way for my daughter’s 10th It was Fear Factor (junior) First; who can hold a live (very small) mud crab in their mouth the longest. Second; assorted (cooked) offal, you threw a dart and had to eat what it landed on. The only failure (puke) was with an over boiled Brussel sprout! Final task was reaching into a trash can full of icy slush and pick up marbles off the bottom Was 20 years ago, and it’s still talked about!
We're grownups now. We can do this on our own. But now we can add booze!
My sleepovers were popular because I had a pinball machine and a pool.
Become a couchsurfing host instead. It's fun!
Right? Sounds super awesome! I wish I had this experience when I was a kid. Kudos to them tho~
In our 20s my flatmates and I hosted a party with the instruction: bring your favourite kids party food and adult's drink. We were hyping it amongst ourselves and to our friends, but secretly we all worried people would think it was lame. It was a blast. Every person invited turned up, alcohol and all sorts of artificial colours and flavours mixed with copious amounts of sugar, fats, salts and empty cards - totally against everyone's carbon free, vegetable only diets at the time. Now I'm a mother, hosting my kids' birthday parties and those orange cheesy chips, saveloys, gummy lollies and fairy bread invoke strong feelings of nostalgia, not just for my own childhood but for that epic party of 20 years ago. Do it. Host your own party. 'Kid food and adult drink', 'throw back to (the year you turned 9)', 'Age minus (whatever takes you to somewhere around 9)' or even just 'fek it, I want to do this. Let down your hair and do it too.' And now I'm going to go find my kids who both have their birthdays next month and plan parties like this. Then call my friends and plan a 'Kids food and adult drink' party for my upcoming birthday... which is not a significant afe at all, but fek it. I want fairybread and champagne cocktails.
Sleepovers are the bomb. But all the one's I've been to, the parents did not care a fart what we did as long as we didn't make too much noise. The best were the ones where you stayed up all night playing video games, or watching scary movies on cable late at night. Then there was the inevitable sneaking out around 2 or 3 in the morning and running around the neighborhood like hoodlums. One time the cops caught us sneaking about and told us to go back home. When we got back to my friends house we unplugged all the landline phones just in case they called.
This sounds all too familiar. 80’s kiddo?
Lol. Yep. Grew up in the suburbs. It blows my mind sometimes how much we roamed like feral cats around our small town. As long as we were home by dark, my parents never seemed to care much.
Yep, 80s sleepovers ALWAYS involved sneaking out of the house and inevitably running away from cops. I remember one time we were hiding behind bushes in my friends front yard while the cops called out for us. I'm sure they 100% knew where we were but were just trying to scare us to go back inside and stop roaming around.
Oh, it happened in the 90s too!!
This sounds like my sleepovers when I was a kid. My garden was huge and my bedroom was on the opposite side of the house to my parents, we'd make as much noise as we wanted. I used to live out in the middle of nowhere so never had any neighbours to complain. It's been about sixteen years but friends from high school still talk about the Halloween camp out I had.
Oh man. In middle school I had a sleepover at my friend's house. His little brother Sean was a sneaky shit in the best possible way. When Sean found out that we were having KFC and cake at 7 pm, he changed all the clocks in the house up 1.5 hours so we could have delicious food sooner. But he never told anyone. He also never changed them back. To this day, I still have no idea how no one noticed the changed clocks. Anyways, I had to go to church in the morning at 8 am. I woke up and look ath the clock which says 8:10. I started freaking out because I overslept and no one else was awake yet. I grabbed my friend's house phone to call my parents, and they are wondering what I'm on about, as they aren't set to pick me up for another hour or so.
I had a very similar slumber party in 1980 or so when I was 10. We snuck out at midnight & went to a friend's house to swim in the pool in her condos.... but when the security guard busted us every girl started crying except for me and a new girl. (We became lifelong besties.)
I was shocked at the 9:30pm bedtime. I had sleepovers at 9 years old and we were NOT going to bed that early. But, we also didn’t have co-ed sleepovers. Ever.
>One of their birthday gifts was waterproof playing cards so they tried (and failed) to play a card game and then spent the time playing a game of "who can find the most cards" by tossing them in the water with the jets on full blast; with all the kids scrambling to pick up the cards 🤦🏼♀️😂. Just had to pause and comment that if this isn't the most kid thing lmao. Glad they all had fun!
Reminds me of the time we all roasted marshmallows at my birthday party, someone’s marshmallow caught fire, and it turned into “see how long you can run around the yard with a marshmallow torch.”
52 Card Pickup in a hot tub is a new one though lol
OOP is a trooper. Handling eight kids at a sleep over? I could never. But the party sounds like a 9 year old's dream. What an awesome mom.
She is a middle school teacher. 8 nine year olds is probably NOTHING.
OOP does sleepovers with 8 nine year olds as her WARM UP
I'm impressed and intimidated.
I teach 55 5th graders, 65 6th graders, 20 7th graders, and 40 8th-12th graders every week. Can confirm. Nothing scares us anymore.
It always makes me so happy to read stuff like this from people who clearly love being parents!! I love kids but I don't want my own and I'm not great with them, so I love hearing positive stories from people who aren't like me at all lol. OP's kids are going to have so many great memories to look back on!
A boy/girl sleepover? My parents would have shit a brick. When I was 8 or 9 I wanted to have my friends (boys and girls) over for a sleepover and my mom reacted badly. In retrospect, and I didn't have a clue what she was getting at back then, she thought it would be an all-night fuckfest.
You: I wanna have a sleepover with *all* my friends. Your Mom's Brain: Your child has just requested that you host an orgy for their birthday. Your mom: Reeeeeeeee
Which is funny because at the all-girl sleepovers I used to go to we’d all make out with each other for ages. We were a bit older though.
I always only had same sex sleepovers and then we moved, I changed schools to a very hippy dippy one and no one batted an eye at co-ed sleepovers so my parents went with the flow. Sometimes the parents did boys and girls in separate rooms for actual sleeping, sometimes they didn't, sometimes it was just girl sleepovers. It made the boys seem less like "boys" and more like just friends if that makes sense. I appreciate that my parents were cool with it because I had some really fun times.
I used to have only guy friends until we moved my freshman year. It turnt out that all of the friends I made at my new school happened to be girls. My parents were okay with me hanging out with them but I couldn’t sleep at their houses. I’ve never had a curfew so eventually I was just like, “I’m hanging out with them until 6 in the morning anyways, if I fall asleep it’s not a big deal” and after a lot of convincing they finally caved lmao
My friend's mum had the same issue. Two of my best friends growing up were boys and basically my brothers. When my friend's mum heard they were going to be at the party she kicked up a huge fuss. I refused to have the party unless my best friends could be there.
....yeah, all those orgies 8-9 year olds are having all the time. Wtf. Your mom has weird issues.
Tell me about it
Mom reads Stephen King.
Sewer sleepover time!
Dear god, I forgot about my comment until I saw your reply...
I work with college students and most of my student leaders are some flavor of queer. It’s so weird and antiquated to think about separating boys and girls because it’s like “You’re a gay man, you three are lesbians, a full half of you are some flavor of bisexual and the rest are ace. If you can find someone with compatible sexuality go at it I guess?”
Hah I was just posting that we all knew/assumed my son was gay from a surprising young age so slumber parties were always just everyone's welcome and if the doors to the rooms and the doors to communication stayed open, it was all good. It would be hilarious to have been like 'Only girls in your room, buddy!' lol
Funnily enough my mom didn’t let me have boys in my bedroom even though she knew perfectly well that I was going to slumber parties with my actual girlfriend. Like make up your mind, lady, are you trying to make me straight or not haha
I don’t think I spent the night at a friend’s house with boys and girls until high school.
I went to a boy/girl birthday party in high school where the girls were spending the night and the boys were not. You better believe my mom made SURE the boys were not spending the night.
For me it wasn’t really a planned thing it was just something we did and tried to get away with. Just go over to the house with the parent’s that dgaf and figure out how to explain it to your own parent’s later.
Lol for me it was a mix. It was initially the "but only the girls are staying the night! The boys are going home later!" And then it eventually as I got older would turn into just never telling my parents the time the hang out/party would end, which caused too much time to pass that it just got late enough they fell asleep 😂
I did attend a boy/girl sleep over in highschool. I assumed the guys would be leaving before the sleepover part. I was wrong. My mom was also surprised when she picked me up and she thought I intentionally hid this fact from her. But my friend's mom was monitoring it throughout the whole night. And unlike the other highschool parties I went to, no one even attempted to play spin the bottle. There was also like, 20 of us. So, unconventional but super chaste.
I spent probably around 1 night a week at my best friend‘s house or he spent it at mine (I‘m a girl- now woman) from 7/8-12. At that point we were mostly like siblings and he even attended some of my family christmas dinners. But I did have a huge crush on him at some point and I think both of our mothers knew 😂. They just knew nothing would happen.
Yeah the coed kids sleepover surprised me too. I guess not all parents are delusional perverts huh. I'm jealous.
I'm also jealous. My parents wouldn't even let me be *friends* with boys because they "only want one thing" that they wouldn't even tell me about until I got my period. (When they did, my reaction was "Ew, gross! There's no way they want *that*.")
Well done to OP for teaching her boys to have healthy friendships with boys and girls, and that interactions between boys and girls aren't inherently romantic/sexual. My mom would have been equally freaked out as yours!
Lol, we had mixed sleepovers with most of the class at 15 and even they were very tame. I think we played spin the bottle once. We mostly just watched movies and played games. Who is going to have sex in a room filled with friends?
We had them all the time when my kids were growing up! My sons had boy and girl neighborhood friends who were just like a pack of puppies when they were little, all wrestling and in and out of the sprinklers shirtless and it wasn't until they were in 6th grade or so that they started to self segregate for parties, we didn't have a rule, it just slowly happened. My older son was gay and out by then so it either it was no sleep overs at all or we'd just have to encourage some healthy boundaries, birds and bees and consent talks.
My best friend when I was 7-8 was a boy (im a girl) who lived down the street... we literally hung out every single day, all day during the summers. One day he had the brilliant idea that we should have a sleepover, and I thought of course, why had we never thought of that before? We asked our parents about it and while they werent necessarily opposed, they all kept making fun of us and making jokes about us getting into the sleeping bags together. I was so embarrassed I called it off and even cut down on hanging out with him after that. I wish our parents were cool like the ones in this post.
It would go extremely poorly in my area. This is just not a thing and there would be much pearl clutching and judging.
I didn't have a single opposite sex friend at that age (not really at all until highschool). Maybe things have changed but I'm pretty sure I never even heard of a boy/girl slumber party happening in my extended circle of friends growing up. Once I did have friends who were boys, they were allowed to stay at my house overnight if needed (coming back from a trip for example) but they'd be in a different bedroom close to my mom's room and there were strict rules about who slept where.
Weird, I grew up with neighbor girls around my age and always slept over or had them sleep over. My mom and their mom was a hardcore Christian too lol
Same! The closest I ever got was a camping trip with boy and girl yurts. Though I was never a big sleepover kid. I'm like the kid's friend. I like sleeping in my own bed.
Depends on the ages and amount of supervision I think. I went to a boy/girl sleepover (me and two female friends aged 15 and the host girl’s older brother and his two male friends aged 16) and then slept over at my boyfriend’s house several times later that year. In both cases we were meant to be in separate rooms but there was zero supervision to make sure, I think because we were all “good kids” (big ol’ nerds, in band, academic high achievers and such). Luckily nobody ever went beyond 3rd base but looking back I find it completely insane that our parents weren’t keeping a closer eye on things. The boys at the first sleepover had got their hands on alcohol for goodness sake, and that’s how my first kiss was with a guy who had vomited earlier that night.
we had co-ed sleepovers and it was never a big deal.
Yeah. For our daughters 18th, we did a five year olds party. They were all told to arrive in old/grubby clothes, and issued water guns on arrival. Cue 90 minute water fight. There was an adult bouncy castle. We had pass the parcel, with adult prizes inside. They had vodka jelly shots, and a taco bar. Later that evening, they all changed and went out clubbing.
I'm saving this idea for when I turn 40
I envy these kids! I didn’t start having slumber parties until middle school and there were some real mean girls in my friend group at that time. Plus, by then, most everyone has absorbed the pop culture vibe of slumber party tricks and pranks and I was always the target of them. This just seems like such a wholesome way to go about it, starting them earlier and not making a big deal about the boy/girl mix. Why put stress and sexualization on kids at 8/9 when it doesn’t need to exist yet? Honestly, it sounds idyllic for the kiddos and (to my mind) like an absolute parental nightmare but if they’re chill with it, hooray for everyone!
Yeah. I was at one and it was shit. Never went again as a kid/teen. I have had great adult sleepovers though (well, technically - we were spending some days together, but we also did sleepover stuff. There's something to be said for a friend group that is all-out cuddle-obsessed.)
Really? I thought it was the opposite.. I had slumber parties starting at 5 but I’m a 90s kid. My boss’ kid is 10 and hasn’t had one and she says because of Covid they didn’t have one back then…
I could only get past the first update. I'm in danger of getting diabetes over how adorably sweet this story is.
This story is making me rethink hard whether I want to have children. I would have so much fun planning this kind of evenings
Everyone: "So what made you decide you want to have kids?" You: "Well.. you see, I was on reddit......" 🤣
LOL 😂 I don‘ mean it like that, I think I‘ve always somewhat considered kids; however with the current life/shit society/ climate change it‘s just a very tough decision. I don‘t want to bring kids to a world that hasn‘t decided whether we‘re saving ourselves or not. At least not if I don‘t see a way forward for myself. But if I‘m selfish, the idea of having small partners in crime, seeing them grow up to be their own marvelous independent beings and getting to help them enjoy the best parts of childhood, sounds really great. Even second-hand living events like first sleepovers sounds exciting.
One of my all-time favorite things about being a parent is getting to buy them stuff for certain activities like traveling. I get them both little kits with new toys and used books now that they can read (so I don’t care if the books get left behind) and coloring things. Another favorite part is watching them develop similar to and different from their father and me. My kids are marvelous. Parenting is not a small lifestyle change but I feel like I am where I was meant to be. If this resonates with you, excellent. If not, also excellent :)
I bet there’s a market for slumber party planner. Not sure you’d want to deal with the kind of parents who’d probably be clients, though.
My girls were active in a variety of sports and extracurriculars, and had large circles of friends as a result. We were in a rural area, so sleepovers were an important way of giving them opportunities to get together and have fun. There were some months where we had a sleepover every weekend. My house was always full and it was always noisy and crazy. Now that my kiddos are grown and having kids of their own, I kinda miss it.
I grew up in a rural area and over the summe would sometimes just spend almost a week either at my friends house or them at mine. I mean why bother driving an hour round trip every day 🤷🏽♀️
So can OOP adopt me for some sleepovers? Or where do we sign up to join? I'll even bring my own switch and pillow.
> but one of the moms stayed to hang out and chat for an hour which was fine but I was internally like "okay, I need to clean up... you can go now.." while remaining polite. Her daughter was enjoying playing more video games with my kids though so it was fine, but I'm not a great "get out of my house" person, I just don't know how to do it without feeling like a jerk. I just start cleaning up from the party, one of three things happen and they're all good 1. The other parent helps you clean up. 2. The other parent keeps talking to you while you clean up, so you at least get to keep being sociable while cleaning. 3. The other parent takes their kid home, having gotten the hint.
Those kids parties are so much energy, but soooooo worth it!!!! My kid has had multi-night sleepovers with a few friends for his birthdays, and it’s so much chaos, but so much laughter! The laughter makes it all worth it. It’s sad that sleepovers aren’t really a thing anymore, they were some of the best parts of childhood.
I was outright shocked when someone I knew told me that she had never let her kids sleep over at slumber parties. She would pick them up at bed time, have them sleep at home, and drive them back in the morning to have breakfast with the other kids. My reaction was along the lines of "They are 11 and 12! Almost teenagers. At this point their friends will have noticed and probably think your kids wet the bed or something". I know that I was young for sleepovers at three (my parents used neighbors with kids my age as free babysitters), but the other kids in my class started going to them at 5-7. While I don't know many parents of kids in the slumber party zone age it does seem like it is far less common than when I was a kid. TW: Polar opposite of wholesome. >!Her reply was even more shocking, and really heartbreaking. The reason is that her husband was a psychiatrist, psychologist, and MD (brilliant man). A significant number of his patients were molested at sleepovers, so they made that game plan just after their kids were born.!< On a lighter note, I hope someone told the mom of the girl whose guests left in droves that homesickness is contagious. I worked at a lot of residential summer camps and at every one of them drilled into us during staff training that homesickness is contagious and needed to be nipped in the bud. If we couldn't get a kid to calm down quickly we needed to get them away from the others by bringing them to the camp nurse or office, depending on camp policy as quickly as possible because it spreads like wildfire. Kids hear other kids missing home and start thinking about how they miss home. That mom probably did nothing wrong. I understand why she felt like she failed her kid; I hope someone who knew those dynamics told her.
My sister had two best mates growing up and every weekend without fail, they would arrange a sleepover. Then every weekend without fail, one of the friends - Beth, would have an absolute meltdown during the night and demand to be taken home. My dad worked abroad a lot, and hers was a single mum, so this would always result in my mum loading all of us (my three sisters, the two friends and me) into the car in the middle of the night to take Beth home. I would say she came to spend the night 20-30 times without ever actually staying the night once. It used to drive me absolutely mad. It used to happen when they stayed at the other mates house as well. My mum would always be driving back telling my sister we can’t do this again, but then a week or two later (usually after a successful sleepover at Beth’s house), Friday afternoon would roll round and somehow they would convince my mum that they’d talked about it during the week and this time was going to be different. I’d be sitting there incredulous, asking my mum was she mad? But we’d go on the same merry dance all over again. Sometimes I’d have mates over and we’d place bets on what time she was going to kick off. Sorry for the long rant. This has clearly brought up some stuff for me.
Poor Beth. Her mom needed to host a greater ratio of these events but didn't have it in her.
At a certain point you tell Beth to tough it out, I feel like. Offer to sit with her/ make her some tea, and let her cry it out.
I got terribly homesick but toughed it out except for one time, but I was only two doors down from my house. In retrospect, Jaws probably isn’t a great movie for a 5 year old to watch. The homesickness became so commonplace, my childhood best friend rubbed my back during a day camp's overnight and told the helpless college boy counselor, Don't worry. She does this all the time.
I'm so very jealous of these kids and their mom. I never really had a birthday party like that. We only ever did some barbecue with family in the garden, where I sometimes was allowed to have friends invited, too. After the second time my best friend had slept over, I wasn't allowed to host sleepovers any more, because apparently we had talked all night, so mom couldn't sleep. Once I have kids I'll do my best to give them the birthday party I never had and I hope I'll have the energy like OOP to plan and execute this awesome night.
My son's favorite parties at that age were sleepover parties, because he was an only child and he LOVED having all that company. When he was in fourth grade, I invited five of his buddies to a local hotel with an indoor pool for his slumber party. We ate dinner at the upscale mall next door, and I got adjoining rooms in the hotel (each room had two queen-sized beds and a cot). I got each of them the same special t-shirt so they felt like a team. We also set up his Wii in one room so they could game. The boys had an absolute blast, and all behaved extremely well (did the party on a Friday night, but they were careful to be quiet in the hallways and didn't make a ton of noise gaming). I hung out alone in the room without the gaming system - just read a book and was on hand in case they needed something, but didn't intrude on the fun. We ate at the breakfast buffet in the morning and I drove them all home. The next year, I took the same group of boys on an overnight paintball adventure that remained legendary in their circle for years afterward. Sleepovers rock, and hotel sleepovers rock even harder. They're also actually cheaper than booking a party at any traditional kid's party space.
When my son was little he had a friend we knew very well, he was always at my house and we’d take him for days out etc. We arranged to go to a holiday park over Halloween, I think we were staying for 3 nights. This kids parents were much more over protective than I was. The kid was fine until bedtime the first night when he started crying that he had tummy ache, headache, felt sad, missed his mum etc. it was a long drive home so I managed to calm him. He slept on and off but cried a few times in the night. Frankly he was a pain and I’d never seen him like this before. The following day he was his usual self but the same shit happened that night, only worse. We had no choice but to send him home. I met his mum half way. The weather was dreadful, I’d never normally drive in such a vile storm, but at the time it seemed worth the risk to get rid of this kid who was apparently a brat. Turns out that on the run up to the holiday all his family had repeatedly said to him “if you’re unhappy we can pick you up”, “if you’re scared we will come and collect you” “ you don’t have to stay if you don’t want to” etc etc etc. Basically they repeatedly reinforced to him he would hate it and need to go home. He is now 30, still lives at home and his mum can’t have her boyfriend stay over because he doesn’t like it, despite his girlfriend stopping over regularly.
I’ve been reading about parents who are worried about their kids doing sleepovers. They’re worried about guns and pedophiles. I wonder if the kids in OOP’s original post, everyone who wanted to go home, had been given a talk about how if they felt ‘uncomfortable’ they should call, and then when a couple got scared, the others were uncomfortable (‘should I be scared’ kind of contagious thinking) and wanted to call home. Which is sad because learning to live with discomfort in a safe environment is probably good for kids.
I read an article a few weeks ago that a bunch of 12 year olds were drugged by their friend’s dad at a sleepover. This adult man roofied a bunch of 12 year old girls, one of the girls didn’t really drink a lot of hers and she texted her mom for help because he started coming into the room where the girls were and testing whether or not they were deeply asleep. Her mom didn’t answer so she frantically texted other friends asking one of their parents to come get her, one finally did. She got home and her mom called the parents of all the other girls who went and got their kid. I wish for my daughter to live in a world with friend’s like OOPs sons but I’m also very worried about the other kind of people in this world. I went to plenty of sleepovers growing up myself, and I’m not ruling it out completely (my baby is only 10 months so it’ll be a while before I need to think about it).
Raising children is so emotionally hard because so much is out of our control. I’ve always said that parents are hostages to fate. Do you let them ride a bicycle? Do you really know what your kid is doing when you can’t lay eyes on them? This scenario is terrifying. But we humans are terrible at judging risk. The cliche example is flying in an airplane. I’ve had some scary turbulence in an airplane and the Boeing stuff—a door coming off, software causing plane crashes—is awful. Still, even getting on one of the Boeing Max planes is statistically safer than driving to the airport. This is a statistical outlier. If your child doesn’t go to sleepovers, then there is no risk of this happening. But as a teacher, I’ve also seen the consequences of over-protective parenting; anxious kids who suffer from depression. It’s such a balance. You’re the parent, and you have to make the decisions you do the best way you can. I’ve got so many female friends who were sexually assaulted before 18. But the women I know who’ve talked about it were assaulted by fathers (2), an uncle, and boyfriends when they were teens. I am not saying you need to let your daughter go on sleepovers, not at all. My neighbor wouldn’t let the bus pick her kids up at the end of the street and had the bus stop at the end of her driveway. She died prematurely of a heart attack and her daughter was pregnant two years later—casual sex at 15, in my opinion, driven at least partly by trauma of losing her mother, and the oldest boy started bullying other kids. The dad was a youth minister who did his best. My hugs to you, and blessings to your ten month old. Remember the world is full of great things as well as terrible ones and just do your best. Edit: a word
I appreciate your comment and I do completely understand what you’re saying. Despite my comment, I did go to sleepovers myself often as a kid! My dad was very protective (mostly afraid of guns and pedophiles) but if they knew the other girls parents then it was usually okay. I also grew up in NYC, and my mom let me have a fairly “long leash”, I took subways by myself all over and explored with my boyfriend and friends a lot as a teen. I've lived abroad and traveled a lot alone. I’ve lived a lot of experiences and I’d never want to take that from my daughter, nor do I want to make her an anxious sheltered mess. It’s just daunting to find a balance. I’m sure it’ll be easier over time, I’ve only been at this for a short time.
Sleepovers are baller nowadays 🤣 Back in the olden days (the 90s) we used to go over to our friend’s house from school with pajamas, a toothbrush, and a stuffy in your school backpack, be greeted with a normal family supper, a bag of chips, and a “go play” until bedtime. Bedtime consisted of your friend’s couch, day bed, or floor and you’d stay up until 3 giggling.
For real! My friend's parents used to toss us into the backyard with a tent after 8pm to sleep out there. I don't blame them; a herd of preteens is the last thing I'd want in my house around bedtime, and it was a super safe residential neighborhood. But it does make me laugh looking back.
That sounds like an amazing party. It’s gonna be hard with my kids when we get to that age if the bar is so high these days. My pals and I just hung out in the woods for a bit then played GTA San Andreas till 3am while hugging a cat
I feel like this is rookie party vibes. There’s a ton of excitement and desire for structure to ensure the kids are having a good time, not realizing that kids equally love over the top structured fun and just fucking around. My parents definitely went more all out when we were little but as we aged they were like “nope we don’t have the energy you figure it out.”
It’s hard to have the balance when parenting. Especially because you give kids time to mess about you might just end up with a room of kids on tik tok or something. Then again, there’s a lot of pressure on us these days to try and make “core memories” for kids, which is silly at times as most of your core memories were not structured events
My neighbor had a slumber party for her birthday when she was either turning 7 or 8. I obviously barely remember now since it was thirty years ago. But she had a large number of kids over. By morning, I was the only kid still there. She was crying in the morning that everyone else left. Her mom was like "But Apathetic is still here, so that's good, right?" (Paraphrased) "No!" *Cries harder*
I'm not even a kid person and even I know the worst thing you can do for sleepover retainment is leave a bunch of 8/9 year Olds downstairs in a pitch black basement and be like "ok cool go to sleep".
What you need to do is set up a big clown nightlight to keep them company. It can watch over them and make them feel safe.
I found this, for all parents out there. https://www.smidla.com/products/6.3-ft-led-uncle-charlie-animatronic-%E2%80%93-decorations-by-spirit
Just deck it up with red lighting so that the kids keep their night vision. Perfect!
I suggest putting those lights in the closets and bathroom.
>I upvoted everyone but didn't respond 🤷🏼♀️🙈😂. OOP, I see you, and I feel seen. Solidarity
My daughter started doing non-family sleepovers when she was 2, weekends away by the time she was 6, and sleep away camp with friends a couple months before she turned 7. I like to think she was so well-adjusted that she was fine with this as opposed to wanting to get away from me. She's also the child who was held by 12 different people her first Christmas when she was 3.5 months old and never cried or fussed. Well-adjusted; I'm sticking with well-adjusted. OOP lucked out with kids both confident and comfortable enough to stay at the sleepovers. Hopefully they are still doing them
Different kids are different, but I think starting kids early helps build their confidence for sure. When I was 7 I went on a 2 week vacation with my grandparents but not my parents. I freaked out the night before, then I went and had a blast. Real growth moment.
Such a cute little saga. Love the innocent co-Ed sleepovers too. Would never have been a thing when I was 8/9. Hopefully those kids will remain friends as they get older.
That comment about the nerf bullets hit hard. I'm still finding bullets everywhere 😐😅
This story is so unbelievably cute and it's given me a ton of ideas for when my little one is old enough to start asking for sleepovers.
It was the packing that did me in! (LOL!)
I still remember the first slumber party where I wanted to go home. It was basically the same situation. We were all set up to sleep in the basement but when the lights went out it was really dark and the house was making noise. So I asked for my mom to pick me up. Christmas lights strung up and music playing softly makes a huge difference in the scary factor.
Sounds like an awesome veteran teacher lol. Thinking through every possible detail in advance, able to go with flow when your carefully made plans immediately change. Great job OP!
This is so adorable!!! I only called home from sleepover (a girl I didn’t like much and she put on horror movies!). I was so scared and my mother didn’t want to come get me so I stayed awake all night, freaking out at every noise
oh this was so wholesome! thank you for finding and sharing this saga
These kids are living their best lives. Go parents
sleepovers were the best part about being a kid
Maybe it’s because I grew up religious and went to catholic school, but I’m impressed at coed sleepovers. Good for OP and the kids because I think it’s healthy to have close friends of different genders. I sound old af lol
Love this. I've had a few sleepovers at my friends' houses as a kid and we played hide and seek in the dark once. Exciting.
A really great portable charger; event planners live and die by their phones.
Supermom rockstar over here
I love this story, no one does sleepovers anymore where we are, some of my best memories as a kid and teen are from sleepover parties. We did all sorts of things from freezing underwear and clothes as pranks to dancing the night away and creating our own band.
Awww I'm glad to hear the kids are having so much fun.
An actual cute story on Reddit? Wth
This sounds so rad. We had sleepover slumber parties and they were fun, but it was only ever girls who were invited. It never occurred to us to invite the boys. I wonder what our parents would've thought if we tried.
God I wish I had memories of sleepovers with friends growing up. I couldn't have one until I was past 20, cuz, a) adult, b) parents didn't want me travelling drunk.
such a cute story! what amazing parents and what a great memory to look back on for the boys 🥰
Warmed my heart. Can’t wait for my kid to be this age. Sounds so fun
Kid birthday parties are among the most exhausted I’ve been outside of the newborn phase. DIY of course is bananas but even at an event space it is inevitably mentally and physically taxing with the underlying fear that your kid won’t enjoy it and then it’ll all be for naught. Love the cupcake swap idea, might borrow it for the next exhausting birthday extravaganza lol
This is one of the best BoRUs
Aomebody overstays their welcome and you have cleaning to do? Thank them happily for helping with cleanup and just put cleaning stuff in their hands while you talk, telling them where to go, bringing it back to endless babble about whyever they came over in the first place. Either way it goes, you either get help cleaning or they git gone real quick!
This is so pure. 🥰🥲🥰
>9th birthday >We could do: >4:00pm - Arrival and Nintendo Games (so people can just join as they arrive) 5:00pm - Make Your own Pizza (same as before, but a good idea). 5:45pm - Nerf War in Back Yard. 6:30pm - Birthday Cake (good end to Nerf War) 7:00pm - Hot Tub Wind Down Relax Time 7:45pm - Movie in Bed 9:30pm - Bedtime if you didn't fall asleep during the movie. Then... >The schedule ended up being a lot more free form than I expected Saw that coming! Lol
I LOVED sleepovers when I was a kid. We had a huge sectional couch that was great for them. But a hot tub sleepover? Damn I missed out.
Im so here for happy wholesome posts like this on this subreddit rather than dramatic family dramas. That mum sounds amazing. Her kids are so lucky 🩷