October 20, 2005

From the Editor’s Desk

12 teenage girls + 1 hotel suite = mom’s nightmare

By Julie Davis Berry
Executive Editor

It all sounded so good at first. We’ve done our kids’ birthday parties at the usual venues over the past 15 years: Chuck E Cheese, bowling alleys, miniature golf courses, movies, Great America. But for her 14th birthday, my daughter couldn’t decide what to do. She did know it HAD to be a sleepover.

So I, in my grand wisdom, decided that instead of having a sleepover at our house we would hold her birthday party at a hotel. The kids could swim, play board games, do makeovers, and eat pizza all while trashing a pristine hotel room instead of our house. It would be relaxing for me, right?

I had read about hotel sleepovers and it always sounded so easy. I called around and was surprised to find out that the first hotel I called charged $500 a night for hotel suites. After a few more calls I found one at the more reasonable price of $150, including happy-hour drinks (sodas for us, of course) and breakfast.

After checking in, we headed up to the sixth floor to check out our suite. I thought it was definitely on the small side, considering the dozen girls at the party, but it would be OK. One of the girls kept saying, “This is too small. Let’s ask for a corner suite!”

After sharing pizza and singing “Happy Birthday” and blowing candles out on the birthday cake, my husband started to gather trash in a bag and make a move for the door. “Not so fast,” I chided. “You’re coming down to the pool with us.”

The other guests cleared the pool when we arrived, hoping to escape the squealing and splashing customary with kids this age. As some of the girls played a game of Marco Polo in the pool and the others soaked in the hot tub, my husband and I sat and played lifeguard, occasionally shouting “Watch out you almost jumped on top of Brittany!”

Eventually my husband made another move for the door. “No way,” I said. “You can’t leave me here to watch all these kids in the pool alone! It’s not so bad. Just think, in a couple of years they probably won’t even want us at their birthday parties.” In response he sarcastically clasped his hands together and looked heavenward while whispering, “Thank you!”

Back up in the suite, I finally let my husband go home and I made the smartest (and perhaps the most selfish) move of the night when I suggested we order a movie. However getting 12 girls to agree on a movie isn’t easy. I remembered back to my daughter’s 12th birthday slumber party when an argument over which movie to watch had two girls in tears and almost destroyed their friendship.

This time it was especially hard because one of the girls is unable to watch any movie that is PG-13.

Unfortunately, there are very few PG movies that girls this age are willing to watch. It was 10:30. I made a bold move. “Let’s call your mom,” I suggested somewhat desperately. “She’s still awake right?”

After calling her mom and getting an OK, the girls settled down to watch “Hitch” while I got a blessed 90 minutes to myself in the bedroom to relax. This was to be my only respite the entire party and believe me, I relished every minute of it.

After the movie was over, the girls decided that they wanted to all stay together in the bedroom. Imagine a dozen girls squeezing into a room with just two double beds. It was chaotic at first. The alpha females got the beds and the others, who ended up being the real partiers, took the floor.

Of course, most of the girls never got any sleep that night. They talked and laughed ALL NIGHT LONG! By 6 a.m., my daughter shook me awake on the living room sofabed and asked if a group of girls could go downstairs for coffee. Coffee? Why the heck did they need coffee?

After the kids climbed over my sofa bed for the third time, I finally started to drift off to sleep when a loud knock interrupted my slumber. Dragging myself out of bed and stumbling to the door in the darkness, I opened the door and blurted out the first thought that came to mind, “I have found hell on earth—and it is at the Embassy Suites in Santa Clara!”

Five shocked young faces stared back at me until my daughter broke the silence with, “Whatever Mom!” and burst into the room with a giggle, her friends falling in behind her.

During the buffet breakfast, I tried to carry on a conversation with two of my daughter’s friend that I barely knew.

“So do you have a boyfriend?” I asked one. “No,” declared the poised and self-assured 13-year-old, “boys are afraid of me.”

We made our way back upstairs where I spent the next hour gathering trash, emptying soda cans and picking up towels off the floor and placing them in a pile in the tub. How many towels do a dozen teenaged girls use in 12 hours? A lot! I felt sorry for the maid and made a mental note to leave her a tip.

By then two girls were feeling sick from eating too much early-morning cold pizza and cupcakes and thankfully one of their moms came to pick them up early. Over the next two hours, girls were picked up one by one by freshly showered and rested parents who took one look at me and asked, “Are you OK?”

To this day I can only say I survived.