THE GREAT SLEEPOVER

These three were born only eight weeks apart. Last year I owed all of them a birthday present and so I hosted a sleepover. After dinner there was a treasure hunt. Oh, no! Not another clue, where is the treasure already?


At the end of the treasure hunt they found new books to read, odd socks and some treats.

Time to get the beds made and to test them out--very dramatically.

This lump is Willow. She's a willowy lump.
Liza in green.
Maddy o'the long pants.
These two are always up for some adventure at Grandma's house.
Willow is right there too, plotting fun things to do.
Like making faces when Grandma wants to take pictures.
These are three of my treasures. How I love them.

The odd socks.
Roughhousing.

Girls! Calm down!
Okay, we're calm, honest we are. See how angelic we are?
Yah, right!
Okay, it's really time for you to be asleep.
We are!
The next morning Lisa and Maddy learned how to make Swedish pancakes. Willow was having a wee melt down and went back to bed.
Then they wrote down the recipes to put in their new recipe boxes. Cherry cream cheese pie was one of the recipes, taco soup and, of course, Swedish pancakes.
These two waited until they were home to have a melt down. Even though I had warned them that there would be NO MELTDOWNS or their parents would NEVER, EVER let me host a sleepover again. They had meltdowns anyway. What's a Grandma to do?

FREE CLEAN-OUT LABOR!

One day, after our Christmas family dinner, I started finding these notes: "Grandma, remember to have me come over in the summer and clean out. Love, Maddy." I found three of these, one was on the bathroom door, one was on a bag of leftover Christmas candy and one was in my church bag.

This was in the kitchen. How she got up there to write this I'll never know. I wonder if the "Love Maddy," was written as she was teetering off the edge of the sink. It looks kind of like it was written under some teetering-stress.

On the stove.See this hutch?
And this one? No one (in their right mind) needs two hutches but the second one belonged to my Aunt Dorothy, along with a Duncan Fhyfe table and I couldn't NOT take them when we cleaned her out apartment so many years ago. So, there they are, two hutches, stuffed to the brim and then some.I'm thinking that they would look good filled with books! What do you think? Then one of them could go into a bedroom. Right now Phil has two teetering stacks of books by the bed and I'm afraid that will bump into them in the dark-of-night and be trapped until morning.

Besides that, Lovely (Awesome) Lisa (see post here and her very own awesome blog here--her current post is on organizing papers--which multiply when not looking, I'm convinced) says we keep too much stuff. "Only keep things that are useful or beautiful that you really love," she says. But she allows herself a few unlimited things, lipsticks, music, shoes and books. So, if I'm going to be Lisa's humble follower I can have all the books I (and Phil, the great church book collector) want. Right?

Maddy has two cousins (we had three granddaughters within seven weeks one year) who I think would love to be co-conspirators in the great "clean out" of the summer. They are begging for another sleepover and this might be just one of the things we could do together. That and a midnight run to Wendy's*, just like Elizabeth and I used to do.

So, Maddy's clever tactic for a clean out may really happen. She's be so happy and so will I. I bet Lisa will come over and clap and cheer too, she's that kind of awesome.

*Shh. Don't tell their parents about the midnight run. The girls all had varying degrees of meltdowns after the first (sleep deprived) sleepover and I'm treading on thin ice suggesting a second one.