GIRLS’ NIGHT IN

Kate treats Marley to a sleepover to remember

Iwonder if your house is like mine, where sometimes the weeks are so busy that it’s really important to add in fun activities to break up the daily hustle and bustle?

I was under enormous pressure to allow my youngest daughter to do “something fun” one weekend recently. To be fair, both my husband and I were working all of the final week of the school holidays, so it has been a pretty boring time for the kids – apart from the one obsessed with Fortnite.

So one Friday night, I let my daughter have a sleepover. Sleepovers, as most parents who’ve ever hosted one know, are really more of a “no-sleep over”. Excitement levels are through the roof, sugar and popcorn have usually been consumed … it’s not a great premise for sleep.

To conduct a sleepover as a parent, you need to be organised. Makeshift beds need preparing, sleeping bags and pillows need finding, you have to give up a whole room for this to take place, and then you need to pack it all down again the next day. How was I fitting all this in on top of all the work I had to do?

Then I remembered about this fantastic new business that hosts sleepover parties in your house. They come in and set up the beds (air mattresses with gorgeous flannelette sheets), string fairy lights above cute teepee tents, pop a little tray at the end of each bed for snacks and generally take care of it so that it looks fabulously exciting for the kids, but the parents don’t have to lift a finger. That’s my kind of sleepover!

The girls squealed with delight when they saw their makeshift camp set up in the lounge. The sleepovers are themed for boys or girls and Marley chose a “day at the spa” theme, so on their little trays were a coconut water eye mask, a sheet face mask, a lip mask and some nail polish.

My daughter and her BFF came upstairs like little luxury bunnies replete in matching PJs and face masks. They looked like a combination of Kylie Jenner and American HorrorStory. The fun of the teepee tents meant they stayed playing in the room for the bulk of the time – another bonus as sleepovers usually equal entire house terrorisation.

The next morning, the Time to Slumber woman arrived to tidy the whole thing away. Pillows and beds were stripped and packed up, trays folded, lights stacked and just like that, the whole sleepover had been cleared away and vanished off into her car for another family to enjoy at some stage. What a simple but incredible idea.

The girls had a ball and I didn’t have to make a single bed, or wash pillow slips or tidy away a thousand blankets. Now, if only the company could extend it to having someone sleep over with the children to make sure they actually go to sleep.