It Just Takes A Little Creativity

If you are a parent, particularly of an elementary or junior high aged girl, then you know all about sleepovers. The chances are that your daughter has both attended and hosted many of these blessed events. The problem with sleepovers is that they are mostly the same. Girls gather at a home, pizza and other snacks are served, silly games are played, a movie is watched and then the girls stay up way too late into the night. My daughters and I have been thinking of ways to host a unique sleepover, and we''ve learned that all it takes is a little creativity.

I began to brainstorm new ideas for sleepovers after my daughters kept coming home saying that every party had been boring and pretty much the same. We sat down around our kitchen table one morning and determined to let our creativity have the best of us.

Our creativity quickly led us to one of the best ideas we have for our next big sleepover: a themed party. We thought it might be fun for us and for all thirteen girls that are coming to our home to center the sleepover around a theme. Because summer is quickly approaching and yet seems so far away we decided to do a beach theme for the sleepover. Use your creativity though, because any theme will do depending on the time of year and on the age and interests of the children attending.

Once we had determined our theme we went to what logically seemed like the next important thing to determine: the menu. Our creativity quickly led us to a long list of meal and snack ideas that would reinforce our beach theme and make the sleepover fun and unique for both my girls and their friends. We are going to have frozen fruit drinks, exotic fruit cabobs, and other snacks that might be found on a peach. Instead of ordering pepperoni pizza we are going to take time to let each girl make an individual pizza with any toppings she chooses.

After we nailed down our sleepover menu we focused our creativity on coming up with fun games and activities to keep the girls entertained without using movies or television. We decided on a hula-hoop contest and on making beach bags out of scrap pieces of fabric. We wanted to let the girls spend use their own creativity during the sleepover as well.

The sky is the limit when you use your creativity to plan the next sleepover or party happening at your house. Involve your kids in the process and enjoy it. For once you might have a little fun with so many kids running around.

Julee Mitchelsin enjoys helping her kids use their creativity to plan fun events like sleepovers. She encourages all parents to do the same. See www.funcreativity.info for more ideas.