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Can someone tell me why it’s called a slumber party?

My wife doesn’t slumber. I don’t slumber. The dog doesn’t slumber.
And, most importantly, the numerous teenage girls who are lying in sleeping bags on nearly every flat surface of our den certainly don’t slumber, or at least not for very long.

A more accurate name for this kind of party would be: An Endurance Party or A-Great-Number-of-14-Year-Old-Girls-All-Talking-And-Texting-At-Once Party.

I’m sorry. I don’t mean to sound too sour, but I’ve been awake for a really long time, and I’m feeling about as cheerful as the soggy birthday cake I just scraped into the trash can.

I knew my wife and I were in trouble when, about two weeks ago, we saw the list.

I counted 15 names.

“Um,” I said to my daughter. “Do you think your guest list might be a tad long? Where we are going to put that many girls?”

My daughter had a very rational reason for inviting each girl on the list, plus I could tell she had put a lot of time into this.

This added to the fact that my wife had completely caved and didn’t make her shorten the list, meaning we had just condoned inviting an extraordinary amount of girls into our home. (Although, I must secretly confess we desperately hoped that at least one, two or perhaps as many as eight of these girls would have other plans.)

On the morning of the party, I asked my daughter who was coming.

“It’s complicated,” she said or something to that effect.

Later, I learned what she meant by complicated.

It turns out that many of the girls did have other plans, but, strangely, they also came to my daughter’s party as well.

What this meant was that we had a steady stream of girls who were either arriving or departing almost constantly during the entire course of the event.

Just when I thought I had everyone’s name memorized, someone would depart or arrive, throwing me totally off.

The party itself seemed to go well. The girls listened to music, texted each other and played games.

At Spooky Woods of Terror, we lost two and picked up one. (It’s complicated.)

From there we drove back to the house where the girls texted each other, ate cake and ice cream and texted each other some more.
At one point I asked my daughter, “Who are you texting?”

“Sara,” she said.

“But isn’t Sara standing right there?”

“Yes. She is,” as she burst into a fit of giggling. “Isn’t this great!”

And so it went. Talking and texting. Texting and talking.

There was so much texting going on, a passer-by might have thought our house had been taken over by an army of female electronic communications specialists.

At midnight I went upstairs. At 1 a.m., I could still hear them downstairs chatting away.

I must have closed my eyes for a time, because when I awoke around 3:30, the television was still audible, but there were no girls’ voices.

Bleary-eyed, I made my way downstairs and clicked off the TV set, and it was only then that I noticed a strange thing in my house ... silence.
“Ahh,” I thought, “now this is a slumber party.

When Mac Lane is not scraping day-old birthday cake into the trash can, he can be reached at maclane@northstate.net.