Sugar rush!

OMG what was I thinking allowing Izzy to talk me into hosting a disco for 25 10 and 11 year olds without any back up?!?! Utter madness! This all started fairly simply with "I don't want any fuss, just music and lights and my friends...." and ended up with requests such as "Can I have a red carpet?" on Thursday morning having already bought balloons, room decorations, food etc etc and hired lights suitable for the hall we'd had to hire as the normal one was already booked out. I was still relatively calm about it until Saturday afternoon when Abi seemed to have disappeared, we hadn't fed Izzy and I was clearly going to have to do all the set up pretty much on my own. Glenn was doing man things (in charge of setting the lights up) while I was single handed blowing up 60 odd balloons and putting down the essential red carpet. It's amazing what you can get in 24 hours armed only with the internet and a debit card.


The appointed hour arrive and bang on cue kids started arriving and almost immediately parents started leaving with comments such as "Lovely idea, just what they need to reconnect after the holidays" and (more commonly) "Rather you than me, see you in 2 hours!" What had I let myself in for?


Despite me asking parents to feed their kids before arriving, apparently they were all starving as the many packets of popcorn and crisps immediately started to disappear, with the sweet bowl pretty much being inhaled within 5 minutes. Add to this a fruit shoot or 2 each and by 6:36pm (ye, only 36 mins into a 120 min party) I was the only adult in a room of 25 sugar crazed children - eekkkkk. I watched as the boys roared around shouting and tussling on the floor, bursting every balloon they could find, while the girls drew on each other with neon pens with increasingly high pitched squeals. I resisted the urge to hide in the kitchen until it was all over.


Thank goodness for friends. At 6:45 Yesim turned up and took one look at them all and started to try and get them into some order and dancing (it was after all supposed to be a disco). She has a son as well as a daughter so is more attuned to how to get a gang of rabid 10 year old boys to calm down - for a short while it looked a little less like Lord of the Flies, but only momentarily, In the end we just left them to it. At one point the headmaster's son (normally pretty mild mannered) raced up to me and shouted "This is mad but BRILLIANT!!!!" and raced off again. They were having fun even if I was not.


At 8pm on the dot we switched off the music, switched on the lights and surveyed the carnage. Bunting, balloons a decorations all gone. Squashed popcorn everywhere but no broken children and lots of happy faces. Parents started to arrive and everyone commented on how brilliant it had been - for them anyway. We cleared up, I thanked Yesim profusely and went home for a very large glass of wine. NEVER AGAIN.


Thank goodness today was a bit calmer and in between texts from parents saying how much their darling offspring had enjoyed themselves, we pottered around, safe in the knowledge that it's someone else's turn next time! Other things probably happened this week as well, but I can't remember - the trauma of yesterday has wiped my memory clean!