Slumber Party

This past Saturday Jennifer came over to spend the night at my house, so we could really have some time to talk. We needed to catch up on what has been going on in each other's life the past couple of years that we have been apart. Jennifer and I have known each other for about 17 years. We were BFF's before just using the initials for "Best Friends Forever" came into vogue.

For a number of years Jennifer and I would take a summer trip each year with just the two of us. We would leave the husbands and the kids and call it our "Attitude Adjustment Conference".
We have rented cabins and camped (our idea of roughing it is using less hair spray), we have floated down a river on an air mattress, hiked countless miles through mountains and forests, climbed into places we should have never been and had to hang on by our toenails, and had visits from all manner of forest critters, insects and reptiles, but none so exciting as when we spent the time taming the alligators. Every A.A.C. had one thing in common, we always spent the evenings building a fire. We would sit around the blazing inferno and talk, eat smores, act silly and usually end up scaring ourselves half to death. So when we made the plans for Jennifer to come over, there was only one thing I knew we had to do......build a fire!

Since Jennifer had been to my house last, we have added a covered patio onto the back of our house. So we carried my fire pit to where it was just off the patio in the grass. That way we could still have all the comfort of the tables and chairs but also have the fire close by. We were going to roast wieners for hot dogs and the night just wouldn't be complete without smores. We finally got the fire going good so we pulled our chairs to the edge of the patio to enjoy the fire like old times. We were talking and having a good time when we noticed everything was looking a little hazy. We had started to cough and our eyes and throats were burning. Our eyes were watering and we were squinting so much we could barely see. We finally looked around and figured out that the wind was blowing in just the right direction to send the smoke onto the patio. (OK, so we're not the brightest stars in the sky, but we eventually catch on!) The smoke was being trapped because of the patio cover, so it was just getting thicker and thicker. We had the ceiling fans going but they didn't seem to help at all. In fact, I thought they might just be pulling the smoke in. We turned a box fan on and tried to blow the smoke back out, but the smoke won and we finally retreated. We didn't even roast wieners or make smores. But don't worry about us starving, we had already eaten a huge dish of a Mexican dip with a bag of Fritos. There has never been a time we've tried to do anything that we didn't have a story to tell afterwards. Actually that is part of what makes the time we spend together so much fun. Lucy and Ethel at their best.

We spent the rest of the night watching old videos of the two of us and wondering where those young girls on the videos had disappeared to. We talked and reminisced until about 3 a.m. I think we're caught up on our lives now and back on the BFF track of life. Hopefully there will be many more memories and Attitude Adjustment Conferences. I think in view of our renewed friendship, I'm changing our A.A.C. name to "Attitude Adjustment Adventures". A new name for new times in our lives.

I'm looking forward to new adventures, and with new adventures comes lots of stories. Look out world, here comes Jen and Bren again!