sleepovers.

as if i have any dude readers who require this clarification...

most of the time, i'm ashamed to be a girl. by that, i mean... i'm ashamed of the stereotype of the girl.

admittedly, though... i take ownership of some of the rituals of the female kind - painting nails, the occasional face mask, brushing my hair every night with 200 strokes {not really}... so when we get together - to sleep or not to sleep - i still imagine we're middle school girls who laugh and throw pillows and braid hair and talk about boys all through the night.

such was not the case at my last "sleepover".

we stayed up until 6 a.m.

but we didn't really talk about boys

or braid hair

or throw pillows.

maybe it's because we're all grown up... or because we've learned there's more to life than boys and bon bons, but we stayed up talking about real things... like robin's daughter's speech issues and the associated motherly heartache, the reality of failing marriages among people our age, and diversifying our portfolios with roth IRA's {right, lara?}...

turns out - the real things are more engaging than the superfluous things. although, there's a time and a place for those things, too...right, corrina?