My mother is getting remarried in a couple of months. Although she and her fiance have roughly a Chinese dynasty's worth of marital experience, they still have to go to marriage class since they are getting hitched in the Catholic church. So there they are, my mom and her man, both in their fifties, looking the total chaperones of Marriage 101, learning about the importance of not blowing the grocery money at the Clinique counter and remembering that the days of surfing match.com are over. So the priest teaching the class is trying to address the importance of Christian modesty and not dressing all skankalicious and he's basically shooting Hail Mary baskets in an attempt to make this relevant to the class. He says, "What if you had just walked out of the shower and you saw your grandmother -- how would you feel? What would you say?"

My mother pipes up, "I'd say, 'Oh Grandma! I thought you were dead!'"

She prudently kept mum the rest of class.

***

Baby Girl got a visit from her Pampa and Nana Jake (whom she met on her first day of life in the hospital) and also got to meet her Auntie TP for the first time. We had a very good, albeit short pow-wow. Walked the Harborwalk around JFK Library. Told the same stories about my poor grandmother with dementia for the eleventieth time. Converted TP to the ranks of Girlicious fans. Ate a small cow at the Vietnamese restaurant in celebration of Papa John's 29th birthday. No, really, he's really 29.

Pampa and Nana are over the moon with Madi and hang on every sigh and coo. They have always been very supportive of me; my father would sometimes make the four hour roundtrip visit to have dinner with me when I was in college just because he missed me. However, it's a whole different ballgame with a grandbaby. They drove a total of 20 hours to be here with Baby Girl for about 10 total. At one point, she smiled her wide gummy grin (the one that continues to make me feel like I've just been told by Carson Kressley that I already look good naked and don't need to be on his show) for a fleeting instant and Pamps remarked, "Oh thank you. That was worth the drive."

***

A few snaps from the happenins with my little alfalfa sprout & co.