A Girly Hideaway

Last night when I was on the land line phone here at home, Grant got a call on his cell phone. I heard him say, "Yeah, she's here, but she's on the other phone." In our household "she" always means me.

As soon as I hung up he said, "The high school girls want to know if they can have a slumber party tomorrow night in the shop at school."

"I don't see any reason why that would be a problem," I said, but I thought: Why would they choose a cavernous place like that with a concrete floor? (This is our makeshift gym, with a basketball court taking up the length of the main room.) Little did I know.

Heidi stopped by my classroom this morning and mentioned in passing that they were planning to sleep upstairs in the loft-like storage area of the shop over the old Choice Books rooms. "Oh," I said. "That sounds more cozy than sleeping on the concrete." But I still couldn't quite imagine that it would be a very welcoming place. Again, little did I know.

When I told Wes what the plans were, he said, "Did you see how they fixed it up out there?"

"No."

"You ought to go look. It looks real girly. I looked up there the other day and saw blinking Christmas lights and a lava lamp and cushy chairs and red--or pink strings of some kind of lights."

"When did they do that?" I asked.

"I don't know. I was afraid to ask," he said. "I thought maybe it's been there for a long time, and I didn't want to look clueless."

I went and looked.

A small area of the upstairs was covered with carpet remnants. They had appropriated some of the spare desks stored up there as lamp tables and end tables. One had an attractive arrangement of a book with a tea cup and saucer. Another had a small boom box, and a third had an electronic keyboard. A very large stuffed toy, which I took to be Claudia (the one the girls had a birthday lunch for one day) was nestled into a bean bag. I followed the cords from the overhead light strings. lamps, and music machines till I found the end of the extension cord that snaked downstairs to a receptacle. It was ready to receive the plug that would bring everything to life. I pushed the ends together. AH-h-h-h-h. Beautiful. Little miniature red-pink paper lantern strings looped across two sides. Clear-glass lighted strings adorned a third side. The lava lamp glowed serenely blue--too cold to move. A large decorative living-room lamp lit up one corner, and a pole lamp with red, blue, and yellow shades illuminated another part of the area. It was perfect.

Except that I wasn't sure that the network of extension cords linking all that electrical equipment was heavy enough to carry its load safely. Wes pointed out a safer alternative in one of the power strips our school owns. I called Heidi and relayed my concerns, made my suggestion about the power strip and wished them well.

It's 10:00, and the night has just begun. For the first time in its 20 years of life, the shop at school is providing a cozy sleeping place for a happy group of girls--at least if any of that can be expected to happen at a girls' slumber party.