Sleepover Party

The kids wanted a sleepover for their birthdays. Now, I didn't fancy having lots of wild children tromping round my house all night. Oh no! So, I booked a bunkbarn. It is like a hostel - you bring your sleeping bag. There's a kitchen, bathrooms, lounge; everything you could need. We had the place to ourselves - that is five adults and sixteen children (and three of the adults legged it before bedtime!)
Tea was cooked in military style by Angela. We lined the kids up like in a canteen and served them chips and pizza with ice-cream to follow. OK, so not exactly health food, but hey - it's a party, right? There was a cake, with candles, naturally. You can't have a party without a cake.Mike had set up Monsters vs Aliens to project onto the wall, so we had all the kids snuggled in sleeping bags, watching the film. They scoffed tons of popcorn and left the rest on the floor to get glued to their sleeping-bags and socks. Daniel had an unfortunate spill, which deposited a large amount of popcorn inside his sleeping-bag. (Fortunately, as it turned out, Daniel didn't actually go to sleep at all, so the sticky inside of his bag was not the problem it could have been.)
Then we put them to bed. And they all went to sleep .... NOT. We policed the hall until about 11.30, when the little ones were asleep. The bigger ones were not, and soon afterwards came and raided the goodies we'd left out for the midnight feast (well, it was inevitable, wasn't it).
Nick and I went to bed during a momentary lull, only to get up again at 3am to put everyone back to bed again. I had to use my BIG VOICE at that point. I'm not at my best after 3 hours sleep.
As far as I can work out, very little sleep happened during the remainder of the night. I know Saskia slept most of Sunday, as did Eartha and to a lesser extent Donny. Mel managed to make it through to tea time before falling asleep literally on his nose, curled up on the floor.

And a good time was had by all.