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Girls Just Wanna Have Fun!

When it comes to sleepovers for girls, there is a fine line between boredom and bedlam. Unfortunately, the best way to determine the exact location of that line is trial and errorknown in veteran mommy circles as learning "the hard way".

Luckily, I'm a VM (Veteran Mom) who's been there, done thatstained the T-shirt. As such, I have gleaned a few universal truths that can help any parent on their first overnight venture.

1. Less is More.
More manageable, that is. For my daughter's first slumber party, I used the invited/attended ratio from past birthday parties, which was a solid 3-1. Very scientific. I invited a dozen girls, expecting seven at the most. The last thing I wanted was for my little girl to only have one or two friends actually show up - which had actually happened (after lengthy and expensive preparations) on her fifth birthday.

Apparently, children are much more likely to attend a sleepover since the parents can have a wild night out on the town or a quiet night aloneas opposed to a luau-themed birthday party that effectively cuts said parents' valuable Saturday in half. Understandable.

The bottom line is that the more kids stay over, the more unwieldy things will be. The perfect number of children to invite is however many you think you can handle without losing your sanity. Just be prepared for all of them to possibly show up don't "count" on anyone to decline the invitation. You can invite a dozen children and two are as likely to show up as all twelve. Which brings me to

2. Maintain the Mystery.
In my case, 11 girls (!) found their way to my doorstep that night with sleeping bags at their feet, smiles lighting their faces, and (in the case of the six from whom I had not received any RSVP from at all) parents who stayed in their car, idled at the curb, until they saw me open the front door. I'm sure that in most cases, one parent thought the other RSVP-ed or both parents thought the child did. I certainly don't want to think that any parent would purposely not tell another parent to expect their child for an overnight visit.

No, the blame lies squarely on my shoulder. You see, I included quite cleverly, I thought a cute little hand-drawn map to my house inside the invitation, along with every possible piece of information a parent could possibly have needed. My surprise guest phenomenon could easily have been avoided had I not overdone things with the map.

In fact, MapQuest.com has made getting directions so easy that

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