When I was 10 years old Saturdays meant cartoons and afternoon movies. I would wake up early to watch Saturday morning cartoons such as “Super Friends”, “Hong Kong Phooey”, “Land Of The Lost” or “Speed Buggy”. The afternoons would be spent perhaps at a movie theater, but mostly watching the local stations broadcast their weekly installment of a monster film (which is when I was introduced to the entire Godzilla franchise) and after that would be the weekly Tarzan film.
Mom and I would watch those together, but that’s another story.
My 10 year old daughter woke up early this past Saturday before everybody else and turned on computer (including bypassing login password) to check email. She was looking to see if another parent had responded to a request as to whether or not her friend could come over and spend the night.
While Saturday mornings may be different 40 years later, sleepovers haven’t changed.
I don’t know how late they stayed up watching movies, but Netflix and the proliferation of home video has made this endeavor so much easier than when I was doing this with my friends. We were slaves to whatever was on the three networks and whatever local station would broadcast. I think we wound up getting more sleep on a sleepover “back in the day” though my memory may be a bit fuzzy in that regard.
What followed was certainly not how my sleepovers when when I was a kid.
I wound up taking Xavier, Dela and her friend to a Mariners game.
It was our first game of the season. Actually it had been quite a while since I had been able to take the kids to the ballpark so I was looking forward the game. It was fun, and Xavier had a great time. We found free parking, which is always a plus, and it puts me in a much better mood. I probably wound up buying too much in the way of treats for everybody.
Xavier partook of the stadium’s free refill soda, which was pretty gargantuan to begin with. He wound up having 3 or 4 total and of course needed to pee a couple of times. What was nice was how compliant Xavier was. At age 6 he was so patient and well behaved, more so than I remember some of the other kids at this age at the ball game.
It was a chilly day, and thankfully Safeco Field has a retractable roof, so the rain, which there was some, didn’t fall on us. It is still an open air stadium so the mid-50s temperatures still affected us.
Dela had a great time hanging out with her friend, and thee two of them wound up going to get refills on their drinks or going to the restroom every inning. Those drinks were huge and the free refills may have kept them from staying in their seats, but they were having fun.
Sadly the Mariners lost, but the four of us still had a fun time.
Upon returning home Dela’s friend was picked up and another was dropped of. This meant a second sleepover. Back to back overnights.
I was tired, so I can only imagine how tired Dela was. She wound up gathering a lot of steam, probably from all the sugar in the soda she had at the stadium.
From what I gather these two stayed up even later that night. When I woke up the following morning just after 6 I heard the television. Going downstairs a little while later I found the television off and the two girls dead asleep.
I don’t know how the two of them wound up fitting on the couch.
Despite the routine noise of the morning the girls slept until well after 10. The rest of the day went as you might expect.
It was a long holiday weekend, and an enjoyable one. Two sleepovers sandwiching a Mariners game is not a bad way to spend a weekend of your childhood.