Cousins Weekend.....going Dutch!!

Where to begin? My “cousins” trip to Amsterdam was absolutely amazing! Katie is a superstar of a cousin, starting with picking me up at 12am from the airport…no biggie for me until I realized how FREAKING hard it is when you have kids (or even stay with them for four days!) Curtis and Johnny are sooooo well behaved and such great kids, but come 8 or 9pm each night I wanted to call my own mom and thank her…because if she had to chase after me like that all day, it sooo wasn’t worth it. Katie is seriously a super-mom AND manages to do it all in a foreign country. I even caught her doing the “soccer mom hand” on ME in the car when she hit the breaks! But not to worry, Katie is still one of those “cool” moms. I mean it. First of all, there is Amsterdam: when we took a wrong turn and wound up in the MIDDLE of the city, there were words coming out of her mouth I didn’t know existed. I can also say Katie is the only one of my cousins who would ever buy me a chocolate covered waffle to eat while we looked at sex shops together! And who kept telling me to look at the naked women in the windows in the red light district because it was “legal, their choice, and you’re only here once!”? Haha, in all seriousness, Amsterdam was a crazy city and it was much more fun to say I “saw” it with Katie rather than “experienced” it.

A quick summary to catch you up: Thursday, after opening my birthday gifts (can you believe that!?! That's cousin Katie for ya) we went to Delft and went out for a great lunch (where I got a pancake the size of my head AND broke the Delft faucet in the bathroom….sweet.) Then we bummed around town shopping and hit up the churches. Thursday night, after only spending a few hours with the boys I have never been so tired in my life and was asleep by about 8pm. Friday we went to the “Queen’s Park” on bikes and then Erik treated me to the best dinner I’ve had in Europe! We walked around Den Haag and saw where the Queen practices. It was such a fun night and the food was amazing. Saturday Katie and I went to Amsterdam, took a canal tour, saw the red light district, the coffee shops, and the Anne Frank House. It was SUCH a different city from Madrid and I loved it. It gets such a bad rap but is actually a BEAUTIFUL city!!! Then it was off the Pancake House with the boys and their friends before trick-or-treating. Yup, I’m twenty-one and went trick-or-treating…in Holland! And today it was up at the butt-crack of dawn to take me to the airport for my 7am flight. If any of the Leavers ever need a kidney or liver I guess I better be the first in line after all they did for me this weekend, hey?!?! Well, I am pooped OUT so I’m going down for my Sunday Siesta….but thanks to the Leavers….it was an amazing weekend I won’t ever forget!