Lucy, Dave, and Non-Dutch

My sanity was saved, once again, during deployment by my completely awesome cousin Lucy. She's come to visit for about 2 weeks for the past 4 summers and she is, by FAR, the most helpful person to have hang out with us. She's 16 and after 4 summers of Camp RiceCake, she's got our routine down pat! I love it when she's here. Having her here is like having another ME.
What Mom doesn't need that?!

I cook dinner... she makes brownies AND cleans the kitchen when we're done eating.
I swap laundry... she folds it.
I mention something about wanting to mop the floors later today... she mops while I'm reading bedtime stories.
I cut the grass... she gives the dog a bath.
I give the kids haircuts... she keeps them all entertained so that I don't have to.

She shortens the time it takes for me to do EVERYTHING. I freaking LOVE her!

We need to make T-shirts with this picture on 'em for when she's here!

We also have the same taste in guilty pleasure TV... Hoarders makes us gag so, we tend to watch Cake Boss (She's always here around Matthew's birthday so, she's usually involved in making some kind of dessert with me), Chelsea Handler (one Christmas she actually sent me a bracelet with white letter beads that spelled "Suck It") and a lot of crime shows. We eat popcorn, drink slushies, and figure out "who dunnit" before the people on TV do. We play Wii Fit and laugh our butts off.

The girl is freakin' awesome with the kids and we're always sad when she goes home. The kids literally want to keep her. She colors with them, reads them books, plays boards games, snuggles with them when they watch cartoons, and builds cool stuff out of Legos. This year we bought a tie dye kit and dyed ANYTHING the kids could think of. They looked like a bunch of DeadHeads... only cuter! She also taught Abi how to make those friendship bracelets out of floss. The girls made a million of them! Abi loved it! Lucy is the coolest person that they know. She is the RiceCake version of a rock star!

Yup! They even dyed their SOCKS!

Lucy going home usually means that Dave is almost back!

This time we only had about 48 more hours left of Dave's time away when she went back home. That was a really good thing because the kids were seriously sad (read that as: there was LOTS of crying involved) that Lucy had to go home. Every year they ask why we have to give her back! I keep telling them that I want to keep her too! But the first place the police would look for her, when she didn't show up in New Jersey is our house!

Dave got back yesterday. EVERYONE breathed a collective sigh of relief. Dave was in Suriname (that's in South America, near Brazil, for those of you too lazy to Google it!) helping to build a medical clinic for the people there. It was a pretty cool project and will benefit the people for a long time. That, I think, is worth loaning him out for!

The kids were SO stoked to have Daddy back home. He always finds cool stuff to bring them when he's away and this time was no exception. He brought them the Surinaamese version of Monopoly!

He and the RiceCakes cracked that sucker open and started playing within 20 minutes of him walking in the door! We own the English version of Monopoly but, the kids had never played it. They've been kinda little... and tend to play other games. They LOVE card games... mostly, Uno! So, I thought it was really funny that the FIRST TIME they ever played Monopoly, they were playing it in DUTCH! Literally, the entire game was in Dutch. It's a good thing that Dave and I had played the English version a bazillion times... we were able to figure out what all the cards were saying. Decoding the language actually made it a whole other level of fun. Playing in English is boring... bring on the cards that look like this:

Dave was cracking me up because ALL of the cards had names of places in Suriname (duh!) and some of the names were almost impossible to pronounce for us NON-Dutch readers. So, he kept calling his cards by what their names would've been, had they been on the American Monopoly board. Gomperstraat Maretraite is totally Marvin Gardens!

So yeah... Lucy was so helpful, Dave is back home, and we're all learning Dutch (insomuch as it helps us play board games!) My world was askew and now it's all upright again! YAY!


**** I could have put photos of Lucy but, she's not MY kid. Since I like her and I need to keep her parents happy so they'll continue to send her to our house every summer.... ;) I'm not being papparazzish about it! Capice?!