5 Sleepover Mistakes to Avoid If You Want to Stay Married
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It’s the last day of school before Spring Break starts. You’ve just attended your child’s Field Day or Picnic Day or It’s Not Break Yet But It Kind Of Is Day and all that time spent under the blazing sun surrounded by 800 screaming children has made you a little punchy. Your body feels a bit foreign. Tingly around the edges. You’re still pumped about the girls beating the boys in tug-of-war. You may have momentarily slipped through a wormhole into a parallel timeline. The typical rules of time and space don’t apply here or at least it feels that way.
DON’T BE FOOLED!
The neighborhood children have descended on your house even though school shouldn’t be out yet and, together with your children, they are hatching a plan. The plan involves a sleepover. And they’ve already scheduled it for tonight.
Before you get swept up by the tiny and extremely enthusiastic mob, STOP. Review these five sleepover mistakes you can’t afford to make… at least if you want to stay married.
1. Letting your guard down when you ask your spouse about hosting a sleepover and they say it’s fine
You’re not an idiot. You obviously asked your spouse if it was okay to host a sleepover before agreeing to it.
Sure, all the children in the neighborhood were in your living room chanting “SLEEPOVER! SLEEPOVER!” while you asked causing your smartwatch to alert you that your environment could cause hearing damage, but still… you did ask for and receive verbal consent.
It’s not enough.
If you don’t want to receive a subpoena in the wee hours of the morning, follow up with a quick question about your spouse’s work schedule just to make sure.
2. Mixing boys and girls
All you really want is to be the cool parent. The one all the local children like. Their admiration fills a hole in your broken and battered soul. Totally understandable, but don’t let your neediness land you in divorce court!
If your household and the neighborhood friend group includes a mix of boys and girls, it might be tempting to invite everyone to the sleepover that starts one hour from now. You don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. You don’t want anyone to feel left out.
That’s all fine and good until you see this…
And by the time you see this, it’s too late. It’s way past bedtime and the doors to the bedrooms keep opening and closing and opening and closing. The giggling is cataclysmic. Incomprehensible thumps rattle the floor.
Suddenly, you’re the one that’s left out… out in the doghouse.
3. Inviting more than two children, and specifically, exactly six children
Inviting too many kids is an easy mistake to make. It comes from a place of generosity and an abject desire to be popular because you never were when you were a child.
When Parker and Emory are standing right in front of you with their pathetic brown muddy puddle eyes saying, “We want to come to the sleepover, too,” you’d be a monster to say no.
Be a monster.
Particularly if the addition of Parker and Emory brings the guest count to 6. Let’s just say there’s a reason 6 is the first, second, and third digit of the mark of the beast.
4. Keeping Takis in the house
No one saw this one coming… except for maybe Violet.
Your kids just found out about the spicy chips known as Takis a few weeks ago and they have since become a staple of your snack closet.
Unfortunately, they’re not just going to burn your mouth, they’re going to burn this whole sleepover to the ground.
At 11:30 p.m. when Violet gets a hankering for some habanero and leads her horde of hungry, hungry hippos down the stairs, the whole house will tremble. To quiet things down, you’ll be handing out Takis while your spouse, who is trying unsuccessfully to sleep in the downstairs bedroom, will be hounding the call center at 1–800-DIVORCE headquarters.
5. Agreeing to a sleepover when your spouse has to get up at 4 a.m. the next morning for work
Okay, so the other mistakes are important to avoid but this one you need to underline, circle, highlight, and then underline again.
If you can avoid only one sleepover mistake, or really, life mistake — start here. End here. Burn it into your brain until you know it backward and forward.
Until you won’t forget it even when you’re curled up on the stairs, covered in Takis dust, preparing to fend off nighttime sieges or Taylor Swift flash mobs.
Otherwise, you might wake up to find your wedding ring missing from your finger.
Eh, never mind. You won’t sleep long enough for that to happen so it’s all good… probably.
Andrew Knott is the editor of Frazzled and a writer of essays, humor, and fiction. You can subscribe to his newsletter for updates. His debut novel Love’s a Disaster is available now.