Golden slumber parties

Okay, I promise, no more Beatles-related titles. But I couldn’t pass up that one. Though, of course, there’s nothing golden about a slumber party from which your daughter has to be rescued because she has burned the tips of her fingers making smores, goofing around an outside fireplace at 11:30 at night. I was already asleepish, though the newly rowdy teen boys across the street, who have gotten through their entire adolescence without making a disturbing sound, have suddenly discovered the joy of teen girls, and there are suddenly long, loud conversations in the street under my window at hours of the night at which only teens would converse. Well, teens and other people who aren’t trying to force themselves to get up and run at 5:30. But you get my point. Which was?
Oh, yes, the slumber party. So, Lee goes and extricates Hannah, who has now learned that wood in a fire will actually heat up before it bursts into flame, and that there may not be any evidence of such heat, and that perhaps fingers are better kept away from wood so heated. Not too bad, but she was in a lot of pain last night, and, of course, exhausted from staying up hours after her bedtime. Despite her extremely nasty disposition, she was allowed to return to the party this morning because we really didn’t want her to be The Girl Who Had To Go Home for the rest of her life.
Of course, her not sleeping meant her parents didn’t sleep, and of course I could feel every bit of her pain. We’re fairly strict parents who don’t generally HAVE fire, let alone let our children play with it, so she hasn’t had the chance to really burn herself yet, but I understand that other folks treat fire differently, and so she may be a little bit deprived. Deprivation over — she knows the pain of second-degree burns. Then, having not slept much of the night, we were awakened around 4:30 by The Wrath of God, in the form of a big, heavy, loud thunderstorm that lasted about four times longer than one would expect — I mean, how can there BE that much rain in those clouds? The thunder was deafening, and the lightning was so close and low that it seemed like the house jumped with each flash.
So, I didn’t run. Lazy bastid.