My phone said 1:24 when the giggling started again. I was at the top of the stairs in my dressing gown, listening to six girls whisper at a volume that carried to Jean's, and trying to remember whether I had ever been quiet at a sleepover myself. I had not.
Isla turned nine on Monday 2 June, and the only thing she wanted was a sleepover on the living room floor, with a film. Five friends, one night, pizza and pancakes. I wrote £60 on the back of an envelope and, to my surprise, stuck to it.
The plan, and the Saturday
Rob was on an early shift, so he was home at ten to two and straight into the kitchen, because Saturday is his cooking day and a party is a cooking day with witnesses. I made the dough at two, a kilo of flour and a packet of yeast, and left it under a tea towel on the kitchen windowsill. It was warm enough that it rose in an hour.
The girls arrived at five. They spent two hours on the trampoline until the light started to go, though in June that is nearly half past nine, and came in pink-faced and starving. Each of them made her own pizza on a baking tray, with ham, peppers, sweetcorn and pineapple. The pineapple was debated for ten minutes by five people who all ended up putting it on. Rob did the oven in three batches, eleven minutes each, and called the orders like a man in a pizzeria.
After pizza, the cupcakes (baked on Friday night) were iced, which used one entire tub of sprinkles, and then it was the film. We have one streaming subscription already, so the film cost nothing. It was one they had all seen before, which meant they talked through it. The curtains were shut, the through-lounge was a sea of sleeping bags and cushions, and Mabel spent the whole evening on the top of the wardrobe upstairs, wanting nothing to do with it.
How little sleep happened
Official lights-out was 10:30. At ten to eleven Evie went quiet, and I found her sitting on the bottom stair with her sleeping bag round her shoulders. Her mum had said to ring any time. We rang. Two minutes on the phone, a glass of milk and a promise that she could be fetched whenever she liked, and she went back in and was asleep before the others.
At ten to one the whispering stopped. At 1:24 it started again, with the particular snorting you get when someone is trying not to laugh. I stood at the top of the stairs for ten minutes and thought about going down. I went back to bed instead, which is the secret of sleepovers: nobody is harmed, only tired. Rob slept with a pillow over his head. Alfie, in the box room, slept through the lot, which is a skill he didn't get from me.
The first girl was awake at ten to six. By seven they were all sitting up in their sleeping bags looking like hedgehogs in a pile, and I was frying pancakes. We got through thirty-one. Alfie, who had been up since twenty past six and sitting on the stairs with his dinosaur, informed me that "there's a lot of girls on the floor", and then ate four pancakes.
What it cost
- Pizza night (flour, yeast, passata, mozzarella, toppings): £14.60
- Popcorn, crisps and sweets: £8.40
- Cupcake ingredients and sprinkles: £4.90
- Pancake breakfast (eggs, flour, milk, fruit, syrup, chocolate spread): £10.80
- Squash, orange juice and hot chocolate: £5.30
- Friendship bracelet bead kit and glow sticks: £9.00
- Going-home notebooks, five at £1.40: £7.00
The bead kit was the one misjudgement. Two girls used it for twenty minutes and the rest decided it was for little kids, and the glow sticks went into the garden and two of them have not come back. I'd skip both next time and spend the £9 on a second film night. Pass the parcel never left the cupboard. When I mentioned it, Isla said, "Mum, we're nine," with the weary dignity of a woman of forty.
The sums: £60 for five guests, which is £12 a guest, or £10 a girl if you count the birthday girl. Parents were due at 9:00 on Sunday, and one dad turned up at 8:40 in his slippers. By 9:30 the house smelled of syrup and the floor was a landscape of pillows. Isla sat in the middle of it and said it was the best birthday so far. I lay on the sofa for twenty minutes and agreed with her.
