Girl's Gone Child: Sleepovers are Out. SleepUNDERS are In.

The Birthday girl rocking her homemade-by-WWW birthday dress and hand bone tats (made by Two's Company, purchased at Landis Labyrinth.)

I feel like we've been celebrating a lot of birthdays lately. Probably because we have? This was the first year we had an actual " birthday party" for Bo and Revi so we kind of went all out. (For us, anyway.) We invited Bo and Revi's whole class, got a castle bounce-house and hired a Princess Anna to come and host a sing-a-long/face paint/sing Happy Birthday... It was totally lovely, though, and completely worth it. The girls had the BEST time and the kids were awesome and everything was easy-breezy no-stress and relatively plan-free. I mean, once you stick a bounce house in your yard, you don't really need to plan anything. It's a beautiful thing.

It gets a little trickier when kids age out of princesses and bounce houses and start asking for sleepovers and more sleepovers. Fable is OBSESSED with sleepovers and asks to have one at least three times a week, to which I always respond, "But you share a room with Archer! Every night is a sleepover!"

Anyway.

Fable begged to have a sleepover for her birthday and I told her No. Because we did a sleepover last year and I'm still recovering never again no thank you I literally cried...

The thing is, I LOVE having parties at night. It's so fun and cozy for the kids. Life is so much more exciting in the dark... and I SO loved night parties as a kid and feeling like I could stay up late so I TOTALLY understood where Fable was coming from. So, we compromised and decided to have a non-sleepover sleepover. Start time: 5:30, end time: 9:30. All of the fun of a sleepover with none of the sleepover shenanigans.

I didn't realize that "Sleepunder" was a word and that "Sleepunders" were common things until several people shared the sleepunder verbiage with me on Instagram. And then I went and looked up several posts about Sleepunders and DUDE. YES. YES YES YES.

The thing about a Sleepunders, though, is that unlike the Sleepover and/or the usual daytime party, you kind of have to create a tentative itinerary to keep things moving... especially when you're looking at four hours of party time excellence.

And so Fable and I sat down together and planned the whole eve...