Girls, Girls, Girls

I've been around little girls so much over the past 9 days that I've been soliciting my male neighbors to talk about football and monster trucks in an effort to achieve normality. I took a week off of work to celebrate Stacey's last week of summer break before school starts again, and I found myself hanging out with her and her friends a lot more than I imagined I would.

First was the rock-climbing birthday party, a raging success, but a lower turnout than I expected. We had 8 kids total, and missing were 3 who had confirmed and 2 I thought would definitely show since they had in the past. Had they all showed, though, the party would have not gone as well since we had just enough adults to belay the climbers that showed up. Everyone had a good time and got thoroughly exhausted, and then managed to go through 4 large pizzas and most of 2 birthday cakes. Stacey got lots of loot and lots of attention, so she was happy. She's also a good climber, the first to make it to the top of the climbing structure.

Next was the Monday sleepover, followed by the Tuesday babysitting of all her friends who's parents were at work, followed by a somewhat costly trip to Dairy Queen with all the girls who slept over plus one straggler. Nothing required an inhuman effort from me to manage, it was just an all day affair with giggling girls dancing to pop music and playing with Brats dolls, the new Barbie. I jumped in occasionally, teaching the kids the correct way to do some old school dances like the robot and the swimmer, and showing them the one my posse made up back in the early 90s, the "readin' the book".

After that was the Hillary Duff concert. A neighbor had tickets she couldn't use and asked me if I wanted to take Stacey. I said sure, and brought two of her friends with us. The girls were giddy, doing their makeup in the car, and running around with their little purses and sashes. At the concert I decided to be extra generous and blew my extra spending cash on concert T-shirts for all 3 of them and some drinks and popcorn. They all had a blast, shrieking until they were hoarse. I still have a slight ringing in my ears from the whole ordeal.

Last was the lemonade stand and cleaning up the fallout from it. The girls and I went through a car wash, and then they helped me vacuum out my car, very nice of them. Afterwards I chaperoned them going to a local grocery store to buy poster board, lemonade mix, and pop, most of which they purchased with their own money. After a quick stop at the pet store for them to play with hamsters and a puppy, we went back and they started work on their advertising, and set up their stand early the next morning.

After spending all day out in the heat selling drinks and failing to make back their expenses, they were all at each other's throats, and I tried to heal any emotional wounds by taking them all out that evening for ice cream. Again. That went moderately well, and I expect they'll be best friends again sometime soon.

Now I've had enough little girl activities to last me a long while, and Stacey had a busy week with her friends with lots of ups and very few downs. A good last week of summer vacation.