Last year, Connor had a sleepover birthday party. We started with a Nerf gun fight, followed by a pinata and a treasure hunt, and then the boys proceeded to nearly drive Ed completely nuts by barely being willing to contemplate sleep.
Connor had a ball.
He wanted to do it all over again.
Ed and I decided we'd buy him out of that dream. The price? An evening rental of the Game Truck. When the website says "mom's love Game Truck because it's easy", they are not lying. It was super easy. I met the boys after school, paraded them down the street to our home, offered them a snack which they ignored, and then shut them in the dark playing video games for the next two hours. Ed and I remarked that there's a pretty good chance we actually made the world a worse place.
But...the boys had a ton of fun, and we tried to ease our conscience by having them eat pizza on our deck and then they ran around the backyard, playing a round of Nerf guns. By the time the parents arrived to retrieve their children, all of them had acclimated to natural light again, and were at least reasonably tired out from running around the backyard.
We have a huge array of Nerf guns at this point - but the Vortex Revonix always gets chosen as the house favorite. Because the guns have different ranges, the boys come up with various house rules and a few kids always run around trying to be the referee. They are ignored, of course. I always like to see which boys dig their heels in and insist on getting to use a particular gun, which ones run around like crazy people, whether they are armed or not, which ones try and develop teams, and which ones get tired and start swinging on the tree swing (which, after about 6 years, is finally reaching the point it might need to be replaced).
At the end of the party, Connor's closest friend asked if Connor was going to have another sleepover. Um...no...but come back and run around our backyard anytime you want!
Elaine
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