Friends

Last week our friends Kimmy, Geary, and their one year old twin girls came from Chicago to visit us. It was so good to see them and meet their girls. Lucy was so excited to play with Gracie and Madeline. They were able to interact with her and she was able to be the big girl. Gus did okay with them. He had a hard time sharing, of course. He's not so used to being the older one and sharing his toys. Judson doesn't get into his business, yet.

Kimmy and Geary are some of the funniest people I know. I loved laughing with them. In fact, I'm still laughing. I love that I can always count on guffawing and my face hurting from laughing when I'm with them. I love the familiarity of old friends that doesn't go away, we just pick up where we left off.

One night last week, Dave went outside to put something away. The rest of us were upstairs in the kitchen. Mom was holding Gracie, Kimmy was holding Judson, and I was holding Madeline. Dave came up through the basement stairs and into the kitchen. In the South we have bugs. In the summer they are horrible. We're surrounded by trees. Big, big, big trees. The big trees have big bugs, flying squirrels, bats, all sorts of nasty things that I could do without. Anyway, Dave comes into the kitchen, and I look at his shirt and there's a LIVE palmetto bug (aka tree roach) crawling on it, up his neck. I started screaming, and that is probably a gross understatement. When I lived in Texas my apartment was teeming with palmetto bugs. I literally sprayed around my bed every night, hoping the bugs would not crawl on me and into my mouth while I was sleeping. I'd usually wake up with one or two dead next to my bed. I was traumatized. So I'm screaming, my mom starts screaming, and then Kimmy starts screaming. Mom and Kimmy had no idea why they were screaming, they just thought they should since I was. Finally, after about 30 seconds of screaming, literally, I managed to get out, "There's a roach crawling on your neck." So Dave started running around the kitchen, with a live roach on his neck. All I could think about was how he was contaminating the whole area and all the eggs that roach might leave lying around our kitchen. And then I thought about how the roach was on my husband. UGhhhh! I sleep in the same bed as him, so now there might be roach cooties in my bed. It gives me the weebie-geebies just thinking about it. It fell off and he killed it. And by that point, all the kids, except for Judson, were screaming, too. Seriously, the world stopped for me. I was paralyzed when I saw that roach on his neck. Poor Madeline. I think she can still hear. Somehow I managed to hang on to her. I completely forgot I was holding her, her scream rocked me back to reality. Crazy times.

When our friends left, Lucy cried for a good bit of time. She loves those little girls so much. Today she smelled a towel that looked like the one that was in the high chair Madeline used and said, "Mommy, this smells like Madeline." It's such a shame they live so far away!