Sleepless at Sleepovers
It all began on an ordinary summer afternoon, when the sun was still blazing like a dragon with a sunburn and I, a rather sensible grown-up, made the most spectacularly nonsensical decision of my parenting life:
I invited not one, but two ten-year-old boys over for a sleepover.
Yes. A sleepover.
With boys.
BOYS.
At my house.
On the last day of school.
Without reading the fine print.
Now you see, in my part of the world, girls do sleepovers. They giggle into cups of sugary tea, paint their toenails purple, and whisper secrets under fairy lights. But boys? Boys don’t just do sleepovers — they invade. Like a gang of well-mannered raccoons.
It was supposed to be a casual playdate. Just a "come over, eat some snacks, play some games" kind of thing. But somewhere between “Hey, why don’t you stay the night?” and the first bag of potato chips, the Sleepover Monster reared its tousled, grinning head.
By 3:00 PM, they’d arrived, wild-eyed and full of a strange, unstoppable energy — the kind of energy you only find in over-sugared pixies or jet engines.
By 11:00 PM, the mattresses were sprawled like lily pads across the living room floor. The television glowed with the eerie light of YouTube videos and nonsense memes, and the boys were laughing — giggling, snorting, howling — like hyenas on helium.
I tried to sleep. Really, I did.
But the laughter crawled under the door, tiptoed past my nightstand, and danced the cha-cha in my ear.
Midnight: I checked.
12:30: Checked again.
1:30: My son was out cold, curled up like a sleepy burrito. The guests? Wide-eyed and wilder than ever.
They say (and by “they” I mean sleepover veterans across the globe), that the host always sleeps first. Why? Because he’s in his natural habitat. He knows where the bathroom is. The guests? They’re on an adventure. Adrenaline. Mystery. TV remotes they don’t recognize. They stay up till the sky forgets what colour it’s supposed to be.
Finally, at 2:30 AM, silence. TV off. Boys asleep. I celebrated by staring at the ceiling in defeat.
At 6:00 AM — that’s right — the chirping began again. Not birds. Boys.
Giggling. Peppa Pig (Arent they too old for Peppa?).
By 7:00 AM, they were starving.
By 8:00 AM, they were gaming, swimming, eating again, and playing table tennis like Olympic athletes who’d mistaken sugar for steroids.
By 3:00 PM, the parents came to collect the giggle-beasts. My son stood at the door like a war veteran who’d seen too much. He turned, blinked and fell into bed like a chopped log.
Poor boy still had another playdate at 6:00.
RIP.
But I was glad. So, so glad. Because he’s an only child, and the sparkle in his eyes when his friends laughed with him — that’s the stuff childhoods are built on. Magic and madness. Cup noodles and Peppa Pig. Sleepovers and sleeplessness. The chaos of connection.
So yes, I did an all-nighter I didn’t sign up for. But would I do it again?
Probably.
But first, coffee and earplugs.