The Sleepover Club on the Farm. Sue Mongredien

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      I grinned at the others and made the thumbs-up sign. “Are you sure? Oh, that’s brilliant. Thank you!”

      “Look forward to seeing you all tomorrow then,” she said cheerily. “But bring some wellies, won’t you? The farm’s quite muddy at the moment.”

      “Will do,” I said. I could hardly get the words out, I was feeling so excited. “See you tomorrow.”

      I put the phone down and twirled about happily. “Hooray!” I cheered.

      “Let me guess, she said no, you can’t bring your smelly sleepover friends along,” Kenny joked.

      “No, I bet she said you could bring all your NICE sleepover friends along, apart from that smelly Kenny McKenzie girl,” Frankie said, sticking her tongue out at Kenny. “She didn’t want the animals to be too, like, frightened.”

      “Nope, you’re both wrong,” I said. “We are sooo invited! We’re all going to the farm. And we’re going tomorrow. How about that?”

      

      Coo-ell! Everyone started getting really excited about going to the farm, even Fliss. What a miracle! “I’m going to send my mum a text message to tell her,” she announced importantly. Fliss got this wicked mobile in the summer, and uses it at every single opportunity. Her biggest complaint at the moment is that none of the rest of us have got mobiles yet, so she can’t message any of us – but as she sees us nearly every day, I don’t really know why she wants to.

      “GOING 2 C LAMS TOM” she typed in laboriously, sticking her tongue out in concentration. If you hadn’t guessed, Fliss isn’t the best speller in the world. “Get it? Going to see lambs tomorrow. Clever, eh? There!” she said, pressing the Send button.

      “Fliss, in the time it’s taken you to send that, you could have actually phoned her and told her,” Frankie pointed out. “In fact, you could have phoned six different people and told them.”

      “And ‘lambs’ has a ‘b’ at the end of it anyway,” I told her.

      Fliss looked scornful. “No, it doesn’t!” she said. “Lambs? Where’s the ‘b’ in that? I can’t hear any ‘b’!”

      “That’s ’cos it’s silent, you big nana,” said Rosie.

      “The ‘b’ comes at the end, stoopid,” Kenny said, writing it down. “Look!”

      Fliss took one look and tossed the piece of paper aside. “You lot are always trying to wind me up,” she declared, putting her nose in the air. “Well, not this time! Lam-b. As if! Lamb rhymes with ham, doesn’t it? And I know how to spell ham. H, A, M. Right?”

      I was just about to get the dictionary out to prove it to her when Fliss’s phone beeped. Her mum had messaged her back already.

      “WHO IS TOM?” the message said. “AND DON’T EAT CLAMS – U R ALLERGIC.”

      “What is she on about?” Fliss wondered aloud. “Tom? Who IS Tom?”

      “Tom’s my brother,” I said, giggling. “You meant ‘tomorrow’ but she thought you were talking about my brother!”

      “And you told her you were going to ‘C LAMS TOM’,” Rosie laughed. “And she thought you meant CLAMS.”

      “Oh, honestly,” Fliss grumbled. “She doesn’t know how to spell lambs either.”

      Just then, Mum came in the room. “Fliss, dear, your mum’s on the phone,” she said, looking a bit bemused. “She said something about you being allergic to shellfish and not to eat any clams. I tried to tell her that we don’t have any clams in the house but she insisted on speaking to you.”

      Fliss went off to reassure her mum that no, she wasn’t going to eat any shellfish, she was just going to see some lambs – with a ‘b’ – and the rest of us all cracked up.

      “Ahh, the wonders of text messaging,” Frankie sniggered. “So quick and soooo confusing!”

      Once Fliss was back, having cleared up the clams confusion, we decided to play some animal games to get us in a farm-visiting kind of mood for Saturday. First, we had a few rounds of Squeak, Piggy, Squeak. Have you ever played that? One person is blindfolded and they blunder about the room until they bump into someone else. The blindfolded person then says, “Squeak, Piggy, Squeak!” When the person they’ve caught does squeak, they have to guess who it is. It’s really funny, especially all the pig impressions.

      It was even funnier than usual this night when my dad walked into the room in the middle of a game. He saw what we were up to and knelt down so that he was the same height as us. Then when blindfolded Frankie bumped into him and told him, “Squeak, Piggy, squeak”, he went, “SQUEAK! SQUEAK!” in such a loud, un-squeaky voice, Frankie nearly fell over in surprise. We all burst out laughing and Frankie pulled off her blindfold to see who’d made such a noise. When she saw that it was my dad, she laughed too. “Naughty piggy!” she giggled, wagging a finger at him. “Big daddy piggy made Frankie piggy jump!”

      Next we played Farmer In The Den, which got so loud, my mum came in my bedroom to see what all the noise was about. “I thought you’d invited twenty real farmers round,” she said. “Is there really only you five in here making all that din?”

      “Sorry, Mum,” I said, but she was twinkling at me, so I knew she didn’t really mind.

      Then we decided to play Piggy In The Middle which turned out to be even noisier. Instead of there being one piggy in the middle of two people, the poor person who was the piggy in this game had to work twice as hard to try and catch the teddy bear the other four of us were throwing to each other. Super-fit Kenny was the first piggy and even she was struggling to catch hold of it. She went running back and forth as the teddy was tossed, jumped up high to try and catch it, and even dived to the floor a couple of times.

      “Come on, lazy piggy, you can do it,” Fliss taunted her, waving the teddy above her head.

      Kenny charged towards her, but just at the last minute – whoosh! Fliss threw the teddy over her head to Rosie, who caught it neatly.

      “Oh, pigg-eeee, where are you?” Rosie sang. “Come and get the tedd-eee!”

      Whoosh! Away went the teddy again, this time to me.

      “Too slow!” Rosie crowed.

      Kenny was starting to get frustrated. And nobody, but nobody calls her “too slow” if they want to live to see next Christmas!

      “You are soooo dead, Cartwright,” she warned Rosie with one of her evil grins. Then she waited until Rosie had the teddy again, and steamed across, rugby-tackled her and wrestled her to the floor to try and get it.

      “You cheat!” Frankie screamed and promptly dived in to help Rosie.

      “Now who’s too slow?” Kenny yelled, brandishing the teddy above her head. “Ha! Gotcha!”

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