Sleepover!

Aisling is having a sleepover with some of her giggly friends this coming Friday (that little tiny kid in the picture is not invited); Meelyn has used the opportunity of Aisling being otherwise occupied to escape to Nanny and Poppy's house for the night. My husband and I are already steeling our middle-aged nerves for the hubbub of having a bevy of teenage girls in the house, although we wisely limited the number of guests to three.

Here's our agenda:

-- Pick up guests on Friday afternoon at the designated meeting place and drive to orchard.

-- Drive to orchard, where there are those stacked bales of straw pictured above to climb on and giggle about; a corn maze to wander through and giggle about; pygmy goats to feed and coo over; an old-fashioned cider press to completely disregard; homemade apple-cinnamon doughnuts to scarf down and cider slushies to quench one's sugary thirst.

-- Drive home and get girls settled (Aisling) and put Papa Murphy's pizza in oven (me)

-- Set out many snacks, which include ranch snack mix, popcorn, cider, soda pop, candy and monkey bread, which I make with only the finest prime freshly-ground MONKEY MEAT. MUUUAAAAHAHAHAHA!! (This duty also falls to me, as it turns out.)

-- Settle down to watch It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown and The Haunted Mansion while eating a lot of junky food and giggling (girls) and get the kitchen cleaned up and the dishwasher loaded, with snacks left out on the counter, buffet-style, and cold drinks in the fridge so that the girls can help themselves (This would be me.)

-- Do Halloween manicures with a sugar scrub, shea butter moisturizer and cotton gloves, fingernail polish in neon orange, green, sparkly purple and witch's hat black.

-- Provide chaperonage in the form of coming downstairs every fifteen minutes to make sure no one is on the computer (learned this lesson at the LAST sleepover - no guests or hostesses allowed on the 'puter while the party's going on) and I'm happy to say that this chore belongs to my husband, who will also be bringing us our own pizza, which we will eat upstairs, probably while watching Sports Center.

-- Stagger downstairs at 3:00 a.m. where girls are still in full swing; put rest of dirty dishes, which is to say every single plate and glass in the house, including my good china and the crystal stemware, into the dishwasher; start it and sit, slumped, at the kitchen table until about four-thirty, when the girls finally decide to go up to bed. Guess who's doing this?

-- Get up at 9:00 and make breakfast -- scrambled eggs, sausage, pancakes, orange juice -- and get girls downstairs by about 10:00 to eat, urging them to go back upstairs afterward to dress and get their things together.

-- Set off at 11:30 for designated pick-up place, giving girls their goody-bags to take home (candy, caramel apples, hand lotion and various Dollar Tree doo-dads.

-- Come home and start planning, at Aisling's insistence, a Valentine's Day sleepover.

I think it sounds like a lot of fun, myself, and Aisling and I have had a fun time planning and shopping for it. Meelyn, however, says that she plans to head off for Nanny and Poppy's before the guests even arrive, enjoy a leisurely dinner with her grandparents, watch Monsters, Inc and The Incredibles and then get to bed by 11:00. Actually, both evenings sound like a lot of fun, don't they?