Polling you...

Thinking about mothers this week, I'm just wondering if you might share with me some things your parents/stepparents/parent-type-figure did with you that you appreciated. Or perhaps you didn't appreciate it at the time, but appreciate it now. I've heard that parents can only do well to improve upon maybe one or two things that their parents did for them. My parents were really quite tremendous, still are, but I only realized they were human beans a few years ago. Until then, they were on lofty pedestals where I held them to impossible standards. Now, oh MERCY do I feel for them.

So tell me about your parents! Thanks in advance. XOXO,

K-Mama

Dumber by the Day

I'm losing my ability to deep think. Think deeply. Use my brain for deduction. I feel my mind growing soft and moldy and if it just sits untended in the dark humming refrigerator of my head, cluttered with half-eaten graham crackers (don't ask me how they ended up in the fridge) and milk, I think the mold just might win. Does anyone have a website where you can hook up some jumper cables from your brain to the internet and rev the rusty engine?

I'm not just losing touch. I can't remember words. Forget completing sentences, I can't remember the words that begin them. Maybe it's because my daily companion speaks in monosyllabic interjections, "Bo! Lo Lo Lo BOOOOO!" Or maybe it's because I watch zero news programming in favor of "Gossip Girl." Either way, I could use some enrichment. Suggestions?

We had all the smartypants peeps over on Saturday. Our annual dinner for the churchies who were graduating. They were all sitting around talking about Tiananmen Square and what happened and why and I hung my head, feigning tidying up the kitchen, wondering if I was the only one who had been to T Square and had no memory of why exactly the students had been protesting. Other than my brain blight, we had a great dinner, and then this evening we had dinner with a couple who are great laughing partners, and since Lovey Loverpants is my laughing partner, well, it's just a roundtable of guffaws every time we get together. (I'm crossing my fingers they don't move away any time soon, too. Only the good move away, Billy Joel.) Splendid weekend on the whole, although Baby Girl appears to have launched Droolapalooza 2008, which is a major sign of teething. Oh that she might be spared the four sets of braces that her two parents have combined in their orthodontic histories. Shoot!

My new cupcake stand. I think Baby Girl will one day find it way groovy, like I found my mom's Jim Croce cassette tapes.

Churchies:  Kayla, Eunis, PapaJohn, Isabel

Oxygen and Greg

Teething?

If you give a parent a cookie...

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.