Tuesday 1 November 2016

Me vs The Sleepover

At 3 am, as I'm madly searching the internet for "ways to get blood out of carpet", I imagine Google has flagged me as a person of concern. I can also imagine that moving forward, my news feed will now feature frequent pop-up adds for serial killer bios,  psychopathy self-testing pages, and all things Dexter.

It was at this point that I became aware of the digestive rustling of the cat in the bathroom eating my current toilet paper roll. And then I lost my mind.

But lets go back in time.....

Sleepovers should be fun. They should be filled with the happy shrieks of playing children staying up hours past their bed time. They should not be filled with shrieks of children experiencing a scene from a date night slasher movie.

Unfortunately, my eldest daughter is prone to nose bleeds. Usually these are manageable, and frequently in the middle of the night she'll show up at my bedside to let me know, and then make her way to the bathroom to deal with it.

Not this night.

On this night, she was sharing the bed with her friend, having a sleepover. I'd offered them the bigger bed downstairs, but no, they wanted to cram themselves into hers. Fine. I don't care. Have fun. Don't keep me up.

And until 2:57 am, it was fun. However, at 2:58 am, my daughter was unceremoniously catapulted out of the bed,  and  into the dresser beside it, in what I picture as a very Three Stooges kind of montage. This resulted in a shit ton of blood running down her face, which she carefully tried to cup in her hands while casually walking to my room to let me know.

As a side note here, I don't watch The Walking Dead, despite the tireless efforts of my friends to reel me in. I don't watch it, because I don't like zombies. Well, what I woke up to is what I imagine a fucking zombie standing at the side of my bed would look like.

And so now we're back at 3 am. I'm trying to scrub a bloody version of a Hansel and Gretel bread crumb trail out of my carpet, while simultaneously trying to stem the flow of nightmares from my daughter's face, and deal with her friend in the other room who basically woke up to a murder scene, minus the body.

It's been a good night.

And to be fair, the last sleepover held here saw a sleepwalking child looking for the bathroom and instead finding our foyer.

I can't wait for her to have a slumber party  where I don't have to spend part of my sleep cycle cleaning up bodily fluids.