Our good ol' friends the Craven's paid my family and I a visit to TN last weekend.
The Craven's and my family have been friends for years. In fact, their daughter, Cara is considered my first friend as we were buddies when we were still wearing diapers. We met the Craven's years ago when my Mom needed a babysitter while she was at work. My Mom discovered Jeanette and Shawn Craven through a church bulletin board of recommended child care. The rest is pretty much history. As mentioned Cara and I bonded pretty quickly, but it turned out that our families were very much alike. Our parents became very good friends and over the years we've kept in touch with our sacred friends, The Cravens. We've taken trips together, visited each other's homes and have created many, many memories along the way.
My Dad and Shawn are very big Nascar fans, so every year Shawn comes to TN for the Bristol races. This year Jeanette, Cara and Cara's boyfriend, LJ came along for the ride too. Now, the women don't come for the racing of course, so the men went off to the races while the girls had a little bit of fun on our own. After the boys went on their merry way Cara, Jeanette, my Mom and myself went to Sonny's marina. Sonny's is a really cool marina that serves food and beer. It's a lot of fun to sit out over the lake and watch the boats come in. They also had a great band and plenty of dancing too!
The men got home from the races after midnight and typically we would have said our good nights and gone to bed, but nothing is typical when the Barnett's and Craven's get together. We were in store for a busy night of partying, which included beer pong, flip cup and flip pong. Flip pong was a new drinking game introduced by LJ and is pretty much a combination of beer pong and flip pong. What a better combination? The "old" people came to party and they certainly had their game faces on as they whipped butt when it came time to play a few games of flip cup, "old" people versus "young" people. Yes, I'm not ashamed to say that they did some major butt kicking on us youngsters. After a long night of drinking we finally went to bed around 5:00...did I mentioned we like to have a good time?
The next day was a day for recovering. I don't think I heard any movement in the house until after 10:00 am, which is pretty much unheard of if you've ever met my Dad, the king of getting up early. Starting around 10:00 am a few people wander out of bed, but by the time those still sleeping ventured out of bed the few that were up were already back in bed napping. This was a viscous cycle on Saturday that continued till around 6:00 pm. Once everyone ate dinner it was pretty much time to party again. I remember thinking to myself, are we really going to do this all over again, and the answer was yes! Yes we did it all over again. We managed to steer away from some of the drinking games to fit in other games such as corn hole and spoons. If you've never played spoons before please look it up! It's loads of fun!
The Craven's left Sunday to their homes in Louisville. Thanks guys for the great weekend. I will never forget the bourbon slush, flip pong or spoons! You guys are great! Can we please do it all over again???
"It takes a long time to grow an old friend."
- by John Leonard
