Summary

A mother is escaping to a hotel to avoid the chaos of a sleepover with six young boys, including her own children, at her house.

Abstract

The author, a mother of three boys, is bracing for a sleepover with a total of six energetic boys, ranging in age from 9 to 3, at her home. The event is prompted by a friend's 40th birthday party, which the parents are keen to attend without their children. The author, who is also approaching forty, is sympathetic to the desire for a late night but is dreading the sleepover due to past traumatic experiences with similar events. She recalls nights of little to no sleep, noise, and even property damage resulting from previous sleepovers. With the knowledge that some of the children co-sleep with their parents and the added complication of her preference to sleep unclothed, she decides to book a hotel room for herself and her daughter, leaving her husband and teenage sons to manage the mayhem. The author expresses her love for the children but acknowledges the overwhelming nature of the upcoming event, which she likens to a "howling pissnado."

Opinions

The author has a sense of humor about the challenges of parenting, referring to her experiences with sleepovers as "PTSD."
She is not looking forward to the sleepover due to the anticipated noise, chaos, and lack of sleep.
The author has vivid and negative flashbacks to previous sleepovers that did not go well.
She prefers to sleep naked and sees this as an additional challenge when hosting a sleepover with young children.
The author has a clear preference for escaping to a hotel to avoid the sleepover, indicating a strong desire for personal space and quiet.
Despite the humor, there is an underlying tone of exhaustion and the need for a break from the demands of parenting.
She views the sleepover as a "wild rumpus" that she would rather not endure, especially given her current level of fatigue from dealing with ongoing household illnesses.

AND I’LL CRY IF I WANT TO

It’s My Kids’ Sleepover and I’m Opting TF Out

Days Inn, here I come

The wildies have to end sometime, but this won’t happen at a reasonable hour. (Author’s photo of author’s kids)

They’re 9, 9, 7, 6, 4, and 3. They’re all boys. And they’re coming to my house tomorrow night for a sleepover. (Okay, three of them are mine, but still!)

O Holy Night, why?

Our dear friends are hosting a house party. The dad’s turning 40. Yay! And understandably, they wanna cut loose. I get it.

Hey, I’m sympathetic. I’ll reach fortyhood, too, in three weeks! Late nights are numbered for us elderly.

I’ve hosted enough sleepovers to know better, though. We shouldn’t have agreed to this! Duh. I have sleepover PTSD, after all.

Bad Sleepover Flashback #1: Our daughter turned 12, and six giggling middle-school girls flitted down upon in our smallish, echo-y house. They screeched. They baked. They pulled an all-nighter. I stopped asking them to be quiet and refused to come out of my bedroom for half of the next day. *Hmmpf.*

Bad Sleepover Flashback #2: Our 8- and 7-year-old sons wanted to have a New Year’s Eve party — our first-ever sleepover, back in the day. God only knows why we said yes. Several neighbor kids and classmates attended. It only took a few hours to recognize our error. Also, both parents of a neighbor kid probably wanted to get high and consequently left him with us for 16 hours. He destroyed the paint on our front door. Don’t ask me how.

And these were school-aged children.

NOT YOUNGER KIDS who CO-SLEEP with their parents for some hideous reason and require a bunch of positive-parenting tactics for a modicum of cooperation.

Did I mention I sleep naked and cannot for the life of me sleep clothed?

Naked Mommy’s gotta streak her way out of here before this begins.

I’m chewing off my leg to escape. Going to a hotel — preferably one that is at least ten miles away and has a hot tub time machine to next week.

My daughter is invited to the hotel with me. My husband is not — nor are our teenaged sons. John and Wes can drive and fend for themselves, but Joe gets to deal with the deranged half-dozen. Joe’s other friend happens to be coming to town for a work thing, and this friend tends to good-naturedly roll with it when kid-related shit (or shit-covered kid!) hits the fan.

Two kidults and a bunch of small people jumping on my sectional, yelling “poopy shart!” and spraying Hot Cheetos out of their mouths. Nope.

“‘And now,’ cried Joe, ‘let the wild rumpus start!”’ -[bastardized version of] Maurice Sendak’s “Where the Wild Things Are”

Don’t get me wrong. I really do love these kids and care about them like they’re my own — sometimes the ones that I birthed, even. But everyone together is a howling pissnado that cuts a wide path around authority.

If my bathroom didn’t already smell like the reptile house at the zoo, maybe I’d be down.

Or if I weren’t, frankly, exhausteddd from the never-ending carousel of illness that’s spun my household around for months.

Then again, maybe not.

100% chance of a wild rumpus on the radar? This weathergirl doesn’t like to be stormed by little men.

But like Marie Antoinette, Joe can let them eat cake and spin ‘round.

Join Lindy Vogel on Medium, subscribe, and follow SwearyMommy.com for more tales from the #boymom hideout.

For more kids gone riled —

How to Piss Off Every Last Patron of the Rancho Bernardo DMV

“Lousy local conditions” drive home a parenting truism

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