Elise's big plans for a swimming party a couple weeks ago were derailed when she ended up in the hospital with ITP again. Although it would have been so simple to just reschedule the pool party, the weather is iffy enough this time of year that we just couldn't plan on that. Instead, we decided to try a "Not Quite a Slumber Party" - all the fun, games, and activities of a slumber party but without the staying up until the wee hours of the morning, spending the night, and dealing with overtired kids the next day. The plan was pizza, cake, crafts, and a movie and then sending everyone home at 9:00 in their pajamas to sleep in their own beds. It all sounded great in theory. In practice though, Holy High Maintenance Party! I've done my fair share of home parties - tea parties, princess parties, gingerbread decorating parties, so I thought I knew what I was getting myself into. Clearly, I was delusional.
First on the schedule was pizza. That should be easy, right? You call the nearby pizza franchise, order a bunch of pizzas, they arrive on your doorstep just as the girls arrive, and you have cute, happy kids eating pizza like this.
Except it didn't... arrive that is. The pizza that was supposed to be delivered promptly at 5:30 as all the guests were arriving didn't show up. As I walked around proclaiming, "The pizza will be here any minute" while cursing under my breath, my house looked like a scene out of a B-movie after some monster storms the house and all the crazed occupants are running wildly in every direction screaming hysterically. This video is a 15 second sample of what was an interminable 30 minute wait for pizza.
Next on the agenda was cake... nothing can go wrong there, right? I mean how could you run into problems with a butt-ugly (but hand-picked by the birthday girl) cake like this?
First, the ceiling fan blew out the candle. We recovered quickly from that one though. No sweat. That's the end of the cake problems, right?
No, that would be much too easy. As I cut into the Girl Scout Thin Mint Blizzard ice cream cake, I discovered there was no mint, no Thin Mint, and no blizzard. Nice. Except for the creepy lipgloss guitar and Elise's name on the top, it was not at all what I had ordered. Elise wasn't too upset, fortunately, but my bigger concern at this point was, "What IS in this cake if not Girl Scout Thin Mints?" With a peanut allergic child as a guest, I wasn't about to feed her any unidentified cake until I figured out what the heck I was serving. Could they have given us a Girl Scout Tagalong cake instead? J.C. and I were all, "DO NOT GIVE E ANY CAKE YET!!!!!", and I think we terrified the poor child. We finally determined that the cake was simply plain ol' boring peanut-allergy-friendly vanilla, but by the time we were completely confident on that fact, I think she was too freaked out to eat it. Poor girl.
After surviving the pizza and cake fiascos, I was ready to get on with the crafts that had now been delayed a half hour due to the ineptitude of the pizza place.
On the docket for crafts, the girls would be decorating pillows and making dream catchers. The crafts went reasonably well, but remember the above mentioned trouble causing ceiling fan? The dream catcher kits were filled with feathers, so as soon as the first few girls opened their kits, we heard a frantic, "TURN OFF THE FAN!!!! SOMEBODY TURN OFF THE FAN RIGHT NOW!!!" as feathers swirled around the screened porch. Lovely. That was fun to clean up.
Last stop of the night was the Hannah Montana movie. In my head, this was the easiest two hours of the party. The kids would all lie on sleeping bags, relaxing, quietly enjoying the movie while I sat back and put my feet up for a bit. Uh yeah... whatevs. Was I smoking crack when I dreamed up that image?
Granted there was a little bit of that, but there was a WHOLE LOT of "Can I please have some more popcorn?" (I think my microwave was popping popcorn non-stop for a full two hours. How they had room for that much popcorn after the pizza and cake, I'll never know.). There was also quite a bit of this.
Once the movie ended, Elise opened her presents and the girls went home with fresh baked cookies and a little carton of milk for a bedtime snack.
Overall, the party was a success. The girls had a great time, and there were no injuries, allergic reactions, cat fights, illnesses, broken lamps, or parent-of-the-birthday-girl mental breakdowns (narrowly missed that one). J.C. and I were exhausted though - beyond drained. We were spent. I will say that a "Not Quite a Slumber Party" has got to be a thousand times easier than an actual slumber party. That is not; however, to say that it is easy. Fun, yes. Easy and stress-free? Not so much. Elise loved every minute of it, so I am probably supposed to say that the smile on her face made it worth all the hard work. You know what though, she would have had a smile that big at the orginally scheduled pool party or at a "pay some party establishment to do absolutely everything" kind of party too. You can guess where we'll be next year.
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