Sleep overs. Because you're never too old for one.

So it's probably been almost a decade since i've last attended a real sleep over. Drunkenly passing out on a friend's couch with a bunch of equally hammered partygoers in the wee hours of the morning does not count. A real sleep over is about pajamas, sleeping bags, late night gossip, good friends and crap movies. 
Yuck. If this sounds like something vomit-inducing out of a Sweet Valley High novel, i'll tell you it don't have to be that way. The list of sleep over activities is not restricted to playing with ponies and brushing each other's hair. Four girls had a sleep over last Friday, featuring gluttony, excrement and intoxicants. Here's how it came to happen:

• We made some seriously good food. Couldn't decide between sushi and tapas, so we had both. Works out nicely when everyone brings something, and we ended up having way more than we could manage to eat. Finger food, aside from being seriously moreish, is also ideal for snacking on through the night. All night. And in the morning. Nothing like garlic chili mushrooms and a stiff hit of wasabi for breakfast.
• We watched a crap scary movie. Yeah...getting freaked out by a cam corder view of things that go bump in the night in a suburban bedroom only works for the first fifteen minutes. Yours truly fell asleep halfway through Paranormal Activity. Not so good.
• Had mint chocolate chip brownies, Ben&Jerry's cookie dough ice cream, and marshmallow-topped hot chocolate (with a generous splash of minttuviina) for dessert. I feel like the sugar high was always the highlight of parties when you were a kid. And hey, it's good to know it still does the trick a decade later.
• Brought along a boston terrier puppy with an acute case of flatulence. At first it was inappropriately entertaining, then it got practically unbearable (what the hell do these puppies eat - that smell is lethal!), after which the desperate nocturnal swoops to rescue the white carpet from being soiled by liquid feces became just a little too funny and surreal to deal with. 

After all aforementioned pastimes, we were happy to call it a night at around five in the morning, when half of us were snoring and the other two were half-heartedly watching the SATC movie with little success.

When we finally woke up in the afternoon, bleary-eyed after varying amounts of sleep and dog turds, we were all in agreement that we should make a habit of this. There's something special about over indulgence, sleeping on an air mattress and sharing a sleeping bag with a friend and their dog (who, i was told, attempted to attack me while i was sleeping). Something that makes you wonder why people don't do this more often.