All Quiet on the Grandma Front

I am in shock. We had our family Easter dinner on Sunday at my mom’s house (me, mom, grandma, uncle, cousin) and my grandma was completely and utterly under control. She did not use one curse word, didn’t mention her desire to smoke pot or catnip, didn’t criticize my cousin’s decision to eat nothing but starches, consumed no alcohol and only refused to eat one item on the menu.

Some may speculate that Grandma held her tongue due to the nature of the holiday – unless Jesus himself came down and spoke directly to my grandma, this explanation just doesn’t fly. The ONLY explanation I can come up with is that my mom made her take some sort of sedative before the meal. Either that or she spiked my grandma’s Diet Coke with liquor.

Grandma needs a dealer and apparently my mom is the pusher.

PS – We have another family dinner scheduled for tonight. Considering the fact that since I’ve been at work my uncle has called 4 times and left me 2 voicemails, I have a feeling that grandma is in one heck of a mood today. Hopefully tonight’s events will make up for our peaceful Easter 😉

A New Valentine's Day Greeting

Yesterday I ate lunch with my mom and grandmother to celebrate Valentine’s Day. Maybe ‘celebrate’ isn’t the best choice of word…..

My grandmother has a funny, in fact hilarious, little trick she plays on my mother. She will look into her purse and tell my mom she has something to give her. Then she raises up her hand and flips my mom the bird.

During yesterday’s Valentine’s Day ‘celebration’ my grandmother decided that the new symbol for the holiday should be, you guessed it, the middle finger. Sporadically throughout the meal she kept flipping us off while simultaneously saying “Happy Valentine’s Day!”

I can just see the greeting card version now.

The Joy of Cooking….and family

Christmas is over. Finally. I spent my last day off from work watching Julia Child make homeade stuffed sausages and take the guts out of fish through their gills – courtesy of the ‘The French Cook’ dvd set my mom gave my grandmother for Christmas.

So much fun family time was had over the holidays that it would take far too long to write it all here. Instead, I’ll just give you a brief overview of some of the high points:

• My grandmother got tipsy on Jim Beam and ginger ale and kept exclaiming “I love the smell of bourbon”
• My mom got the pajamas that she didn’t want
• During a trip to see some Xmas lights, my grandmother turned to me and said, “Let’s talk about assholes. There’s thousands of them.”
• My family did not wait for me to begin eating Christmas dinner – when I showed up (5 minutes early) they were almost done
• My mom made coconut cupcakes especially for my grandmother, to which my grandmother said “I don’t see any coconut on these cupcakes” and then didn’t even eat one

Pajama Party

Last week, my grandmother called and asked me if I would pick out and buy a nice pair of warm pajamas for her to give my mother for Christmas. I told her that I would. I failed to mention that I had already bought my mom a pair of pajamas for Christmas because I didn’t want to burst her bubble. So, I decided I would just give my mom the pajamas I had bought her as a gift and tell her they were from my grandmother. No harm no foul. My grandmother would be happy and my mom would never know the difference.

Things didn’t work out how I planned.

The next day, I received this email from my mother:

‘Do you have time to go to the store and pick out a nice pair of warm pajamas that your grandmother can give you as a Christmas present?’

As I laughed out loud, I emailed to tell my mother I would be happy to and informed her that she too would be the recipient of a nice warm pair of pajamas from grandmother. To this she replied that she didn’t want any pajamas because she just bought two new pairs.

Merry Christmas to me.

Let them eat bread

This year, I had to work on Thanksgiving day so my mom and grandmother agreed to do the family turkey dinner on Wednesday night. Because, of course, I am the golden child.

The dinner was perfect, thanks mostly to my grandmother’s contributions of homemade mac’n cheese (I even got a special dish to take home and cook myself later…) and stuffing. My mom did pretty well herself with the turkey, cranberry sauce, green bean casserole and sweet potato pie.

As the meal came to an end, my grandmother asked me whether or not ‘those people’ I work with at the restaurant would be feeding us on Thanksgiving Day. I sighed and told her I didn’t think so – I mean, after all, they were already paying us $2.13/hr to spend the ENTIRE holiday serving turkey to everyone else in town. ‘Well’, she said ‘they better at least give you a piece of toast….If not, call me.’ 

My grandmother is like my own Tony Soprano.