Sleepover Drives

My older, almost 15 year old daughter has two sleepovers this weekend. The first one -– last night – was with her entire class at one of the girl’’s houses. She called me at 8 am this morning to come pick her up.

When she stumbled into the car wearing some boy’’s clothes, the first thing she told me was that she had only gotten about one hour of sleep. I started the car and set off on the 10 minute drive home. My daughter haltingly launched into the first story about the night before and then picked up the pace as detail after detail came pouring out of her in no particular order. I heard how she first tried to “sleep “in the street”” because it was too hot to be in the tent. But that was too wet and uncomfortable, so she and “”one of the other boys”” begged their way into a tent after all. That was all after her 3 am walk to the cornfield with two girls -– one of whom had arranged a rendezvous with an uninvited “friend”. My daughter added that they had some kind of ““open relationship”” but that she didn’’t really understand what that meant. The three returned to the group a while later, hooded and half masked, setting some of the girls off screaming, thinking they were a bunch of intruders, which brought on the second or third warning from the neighbors that they were going to call the police. A group of boys invented a new game called “”The Pizza Slap”” which, apparently, is played exactly the way it sounds. Another boy discovered that scratching the tents from the outside with an electric toothbrush made a really eerie sound and got some of the girls inside screeching again. Despite the co-ed sleeping arrangements, there was apparently only one short episode of the romantic kind in the entire event when one boy declared his love for one of the girls and she said they would talk about it later because – right then she had to go to the bathroom and then she left and then never returned for the talk. Being a music class, they made their own music the entire evening with guitars and makeshift percussion instruments. They played and sang until my daughter’’s voice was almost gone. Eventually exhaustion laid the last of them low and the night ended. As I was pulling into our carport at home, my daughter added that a lot of videos were made and she would show them to me later. She got out of the car and went straight to bed.

I woke her up this afternoon an hour before she had to leave for Sleepover #2. This time it is in the church with her confirmation group and it is being supervised by the religion teacher. The information sheet she got last week instructed her about what to bring along, including ““a good mood!”” and “”an appetite for ice cream!”” and ““snacks for the movie time!”” and “”a willingness to take part in a quiz rally in the garden!”” Our 10 minute drive to the church was silent.