Monday, January 21, 2013

The Sleepover

Tiffany's sleepover began with typical sleepover antics, and we were already deep in the midst of a frenetic, candy-fueled rampage when someone said, "Let's go outside!"


I was following the small pack of girls scampering into the night when whumf, the solid ground upon which my tiny feet had been galloping moments earlier suddenly vanished.


I had fallen into a small gap between the back door and the deck's edge.

I wasn't hurt.  For a fleeting moment, I thought I could wrench myself free before anyone noticed.


But my leg wouldn't budge.  Besides, I was already too late.  Eight-year-olds have extraordinarily keen senses.  Their ears prick up at the first sign of misfortune.












Mrs. Tiffany's Mom rushed outside and examined my leg.  I can only imagine what she must have been thinking at that moment.


I sat helplessly as the girls crowded around me, fascinated.  At that moment, a strange calm washed over me.  My sobs subsided.  What was happening to me was so bizarre, so entirely unexpected and unprecedented, it had exceeded my mental and emotional capacities entirely. 

At first, the girls pelted me with eager questions.


Then they became overly solicitous, as though they were competing to determine who could be most attentive to my needs.


Then, sensing that no one was in immediate mortal peril, they got bored.



The sleepover resumed inside, at first in a subdued, deferential tone, until the girls simply could not contain their natural eight-year-old mirth any longer.  After a while, the indifferent voices of the Spice Girls blared from the living room, mingled with tiny stomps and gleeful shrieks, while Mrs. Tiffany's Mom and I sat in the dim glow of the porch light, waiting for her boyfriend to bring his truck.


Eventually, the boyfriend arrived and, after an agonizing period of fiddling and calculating, fastened his rear fender to one of the deck posts with a rope.  The girls gathered quietly in the doorway as his engine roared and his tires squealed in the mud.




To my astonishment, the deck really did lurch incrementally forward, just enough to free my leg.

I was led like a war hero into the master bedroom.  Parents' bedrooms are the forbidden paradise of sleepovers, and I felt like a pauper in a palace as I washed the small cut on my leg in the garden tub.  Tiffany's mom insisted I lie down for a while in her water bed.  The girls lined up to pay their bedside respects before being ushered to their sleeping bags on Tiffany's bedroom floor.  And the sleepover was done.  As I sloshed gently under the blankets, I contemplated the enormity of the night's events.


19 comments:

  1. Wow! My "friends" would have laughed at me and then they would have been pissed because we couldn't help being discovered outside, where we never had permission to be at a sleepover.

    Love,
    Janie

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  2. The best sleepover I ever did was in conjunction with the 2000 Super Bowl. We watched movies, then the game. I did not get my foot stuck anywhere. They had reindeer, though. I imagine there's a good story possible about a reindeer who thinks they're at least as good as Santa, but end up getting stuck in a chimney.

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    1. If I were a reindeer, that would totally happen to me, because that is just the kind of luck I have.

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  3. How are you able to recapture the EXACT way an 8 year old thinks & reacts? This was awesome. So much to love here (the mom's reaction would've been the same as mine..."Crap...I broke somebody else's kid"). Loved the waterbed finale.

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    Replies
    1. Thank you so much for saying that! I really agonized over the portrayal of the 8-year-olds. There was much editing and self-doubting. My mind is finally at ease now.

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  4. Hilarious!!! (as usual)
    Is your leg ok now?

    xxo
    MOV

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    Replies
    1. Don't worry, after I got my new wooden leg fitted, everything was fine!

      (Just kidding. It's made of gold.)

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  5. Came over from MOV's blog; too funny!! I, like Marianne, like the mom's reaction; I too would have thought the same thing :)

    enjoy the day!

    betty

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    Replies
    1. Thanks for checking out my blog! I am proud to be sharing readers with the likes of MOV. She is one of my favorite Internet people.

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  6. WoW!!! You are indeed the stuff that 8 year old legends are made of!

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  7. Was so excited to hop over and see a new Haley's Comic!
    I used to love my parents' waterbed and hubby and I had one when we were first married...the big gawdy, 6 foot tall, wood, with at least one mirror embellished with ugly gold paint, kind.
    Thanks for refreshing that old mem and for the chuckle.

    ~Michelle

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    Replies
    1. You are most welcome! That waterbed sounds stylin'... hahaha. Thank YOU for the hilarious mental image.

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  8. I would like to Google+ you and tweet attention to you, but I don't see the little icons at the bottom of your post. I think you can add them if you go to layout and look at the options. MOV ordered me to get more attention for you, and I am trying. I re-tweeted your tweet about your post.

    Love again,
    Janie

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    Replies
    1. Janie, your comment confused me at first because I *knew* I had share buttons. But I looked, and they're gone! And Blogger won't let me re-add them. I go to Layout > Posts > Edit and check "Share Buttons," but after I save and refresh the page, they still aren't there. Also, I keep unchecking "Labels" because I don't really want them under each post, yet they aren't going away.

      So basically, my page layout hates me right now, and I don't know why.

      Thank you for pointing this out, though, because I sent a report to Blogger about it. Hopefully I can fix it soon.

      Other commenters, are you seeing any share buttons under my posts? (You know, social media icons, etc.)

      Delete
    2. Update: Blogger's share buttons still won't show up on my posts, BUT I got impatient and looked up the code to add them myself. So you should see some share buttons under each post now. They're very basic but hopefully you guys will find them useful! Now go forth and make me Internet famous!

      Delete
  9. This was too cute! A great memory. A small cut was a little price to pay for that, I think.

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  10. Sorry, I guess I'm truly warped because I kept waiting for them to bust out laughing. You have kind friends...;o)

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