Last night my three older daughters spent the night in an Embassy Suites hotel room with a bunch of other young girls as part of a sleepover birthday party for a good friend of theirs. As per the instruction manual, the kids ate mostly junk food, played very hard, did all sorts of things they would normally not do and stood up way too late.
As a parent I can live with almost all of these things. All, save for the staying up way too late bit. See when a kid stays up too late he/she tends to get crankier than a hungry hippo that is tied up 20 feet away from food with a chain that is 18 feet long. In fact, the only thing worse on this planet than a cranky kid that has stayed up too late is multiples of said cranky children that have stayed up way too late.
Such is the case with my day today.
I picked the kids up this morning at about 10:30 and found out that they had stayed up until about 3:00 in the morning. Not too unusual for a sleep over (heck, there are times when they stay up almost that late, er early, at home under normal circumstances). The unusual thing was that they woke up early so that they could get their breakfast on and prepare to go home for the day. How early you ask? Around 7:00 this morning or so.
Yep, four hours of sleep. Nope, not nearly enough.
As was evidenced by the extraordinary fighting that ensued almost immediately upon them entering the car. 45 minutes is a long time by itself. Put five kids together in a car and let them loose on each other and that 45 minutes begins to feel like 45 weeks. Why five kids you ask, when only three slept over? Well, the law of child physics states that “… whenever a child is in a state of crankiness borne from lack of sleep, food, water or toilets said child will exude crankiness at a distance and to a degree equal to that of their nearest sibling, parent or other human with whom such crankiness might bear resemblance; …”. So in effect three cranky kids makes for a truck full of seven cranky people.
So right now they are all in bed. No, not just their rooms. Their beds. They need sleep. And because of the work involved in just tuning out their crankiness I now need sleep. And so does the wife. So it would seem that because of my three oldest daughters’ refusal to get to sleep at a decent hour last night the entire house is now subject to a property wide lockdown.
Now if I jut had an island that I could send all my kids to in times like this I would be able to sit back, relax and watch some Pro Bowl, seeing as it is the last NFL of the season. Actually, seeing as the Pro Bowl is played in Hawaii, perhaps it isn’t the kids that need an island all to themselves so much as it is me.