1405 Pawnee Drive in Olathe KS  holds a ton of childhood memories for me.  I grew up in the house diagonal from there, 2000 Cherokee Lane, and I was instantly best friends with Lisa, or Lee, as we call her.  I remember spending pretty much every waking moment with her.  Since we were inseparable, I also became very close to her family…love them!   To this day, Lee is seen as part of my family and I am part of hers.  It’s a life-long friendship that we are so blessed to have.  I know it’s rare, but I hope my kids can have similar life-long friendships with someone.

The Catalina house was ‘the place to be’ to eat junk food, sleepover, stay up late, and play card games.  Which brings me to my main point of this post!  Lonnie and Jim opened up their home last Friday night to have a ‘card night reunion’ of sorts.  They still live on Pawnee Drive, although it looks dramatically different because Lonnie has painted every square inch inside.  I’m serious, they joke that if you stand still long enough, she will paint you!  I have so many fun memories inside that house!  I literally could write pages and pages of things that I remember.

Of course, Lonnie made bunches of snacks and we all gathered to play 31 which requires 3 quarters a round.  All of us brought our piggy banks; rather it be a giant bud light bottle, a spider-man Tupperware cup, or a secret stash in the Catalina furniture.  Of course Ryan was trying to intimidate us with a crisp $100 bill in his pile and wanted to up the stakes pretty quickly so we started playing ‘Guts.’  So many laughs and lots of joking around occurred and it was an awesome break from the craziness of our normal lives.  Thank you Catalina family!!  I’m going to declare myself the big winner because by 1:30am the bets were getting silly and I took most of Greg’s remaining money or Malaysian coins, gold doubloons, and everything else he was trying to pass off as real money 🙂  Love all of you to pieces and I hope we can re-match again soon!