What smarty-party-pants came up with the idea of a kid sleepover?  Someone who was going out of town overnight?  In our household, the sleepover is rarely a good idea.  We all do best with a good night’s sleep.  No one here is a natural early riser.  We still enforce a fairly consistent bedtime at their age, which is SO NOT COOL, but the kids are happier and healthier that way.  I am not particularly interested in being cool.   Being cool is not my job.  And as Bill Cosby once said, “Parents are not interested in justice, they’re interested in peace and quiet.”  Amen to that.  Everything is hunky-dory around here as long as things get quiet and everyone gets sleep.  Me included.

Then the sleepover invitation arrives in the mail, or via the more spontaneous phone call.  Dang!  Now I have to be the bad guy, or live with the consequences.  And the worst part?  People do not even call it the right name, since we all know no one sleeps.  It is a stayupover.  Or a stayawakeover, maybe.  Let’s just be frank about the situation.

Sometimes I do wish I could be a more Fun Mom, the host of the the house where all the kids gravitate.  The one with endless patience for noise and chaos and general frivolity and merrymaking.  I know women like that, and their kids seem well rested enough.  Those moms are not wearing a straitjacket (unless they are wearing it to bed during a stayawakeover).  I don’t want to be the host of the house with the wailing and gnashing of teeth of biblical proportions.  Can’t we all just have some fun and then everybody catch some happy Zzzzzz?

Please?

Okay, okay, so it is a kid’s right of passage, to stay up all night.  I am happy my kids have good friends who want to hang out and have fun.  Everyone recovers and life goes back to normal (a mere 72 hours later).  And normal only seems normal if something abnormal happens once in a while.  Parenting provides such endless opportunities to be The Uncool Bad Guy for their own good and safety and character-building.  I’ll try to lighten up about the sleeplessover, and have my own LetItGo-over.  A GetOverItAlready-over.  We can have a nap-over the next day.

Still, I am going to propose a radical idea to parents everywhere — the sleepmoreover.  If we form a united front, perhaps we can convince them that sleep is the new cool…