‘Are you sure I was nice to them?’ Lulu asked me on Sunday evening. It was after a whole afternoon of hanging out with our new boat kid friends in Bonaire.

I looked at Lulu carefully. She must be a little unused to hanging out with other kids to come out with a statement like that. Well, a question.

And she is such a social kid, our Lu is. There’s nothing she likes more than hanging out with other kids.

It made me smile. Bless her. Especially the part of the story with the kids hanging out together in town – where she ordered herself a double espresso. The other five kids used to eating ice cream and drinking water; they all stared at her.

‘You drink double espresso?’ one of them asked.

‘Of course I drink espresso,’ she replied breezily. ‘Who doesn’t?’

Yep, that’s our Lu. Totally normal. Hanging out with French art dealers, New Zealand circumnavigators and American commercial airline staff hasn’t had any effect on her – at all.

But our kid is full of surprises. Later, one of the girls dropped a make-up item in the Chinese supermarket. It dislodged the powder stack from the make-up case. The kids quickly put it back in. No matter though. The owner of the store had seen it happen – and was ready to charge them for it.

‘But it isn’t broken,’ Lu explained to her.

The owner wasn’t budging. Neither was Lu though. She was happy to keep going. It wasn’t fair, Lu said. Especially as the store owner admitted she was only going to put it on the shelf and sell it again. The make-up wasn’t broken after all, just temporarily dislodged. And the boat kid who dropped it was upset Lu said that was the worst part. She didn’t like the injustice of the situation – at all.

‘We did pay for it in the end though,’ she said. ‘just because it seemed inappropriate to keep going. And it only cost four bucks.’

I nodded. ‘You took it, right? You didn’t let that woman sell it again?’

Lu turned her head slowly towards me. ‘Of course we took it.’

I smiled. This time on the inside. That’s my girl.

‘You’re really good at arguing,’ one of the boat kids said to Lulu after they left the store.

Delph jumped in at this point. ‘That’s normal. She’s had a lot of practice.’