Maybe 4 hours
If I was lucky. That’s the amount of sleep I got on Saturday night.
So it’s 6pm on Halloween night, and Gilli’s first friend shows up. I”m already realizing this is going to be a long night because she’s a) afraid of our cats, b) never had a sleepover, and c) has never been trick or treating before. Yeah, I know, she’s 10.
I’ll give the 1$ version instead of going into lots of details. They all got there, made buttons for their candy bags so they could tell who’s was who’s, went out trick or treating with my wife for about 2 hours – IN THE RAIN – came back, ate pizza, watched some movies, and finally crashed at 12.
The only problem with this was we couldn’t let the cats out for fear that her one friend would scream bloody murder and wake them all up. So what did I do?
After listening to them for about an hour, I booted my son into my bed, grabbed the cats with food water and litter box, and suffered through 7 hours of scratching at the door, meowing, and generally trying to get out all night. Finally woke up around 6:30 and made the girls pancakes. They all ended up leaving by 10 or so, and I started cleaning up for friends coming over that afternoon. Yeah, I know 
That’s why I left Fae to sleep, so someone would be coherent for our friends coming over. Tho I had a bunch of coffee and was mostly okay.
That little girl will never know what I went through to make sure that her first Halloween, her first sleepover was as positive as possible. The most important thing was to make my daughters first sleep over a positive experience, and by helping out her friend and losing a little sleep, I think I did it. She even came over and gave me a cheek-kiss at one point.
“What was that for?”
“I know you didn’t get a lot of sleep because you wanted my friend to not be scared. I really do have the best Daddy.” and hugged me.
I truly understood what fatherhood is all about, and losing a little sleep was well worth a group of happy little girls, especially the little one that was sitting in my lap at that moment.
