Alert Darwin

I have to tell you about this amazing species that I stumbled upon this past week. It's called a grandparent. Apparently, these things are crawling all over the place. Did you know this? Why didn't someone tell me this? Anyway, this life form cleverly disguises itself as a normal human, but it possesses some extraordinary qualities.

This particular set of grandparents (note: Members of this species may respond to a multitude of names. The pair that I studied reacted favorably to Grandpa and Mimi Fife) was capable of folding massive quantities of laundry, cooking incredible meals, cleaning up after incredible meals, and making my baby very, very happy:


Can they stay forever?


After I ran out of chores for them to do (actually, I just couldn't find the shovel to have them landscape the backyard), I had pity and decided it would be in my best interest to feed them. So, I fixed them each a lovely bowl of Uncle Sam Cereal. This is where they displayed some very clever manipulation techniques. I'm still not sure how they did it, but somehow, we found ourselves sitting outside on the deck of the Diving Pelican having eggs Benedict and waffles with fresh fruit instead.


We left Mike at home with Uncle Sam.

Next, we took them for some exercise in beautiful Filoli Gardens. It was a chilly day.


Please, let me go with Grandpa and Mimi. I bet they'll get this hat off of me.

They still weren't showing any signs of cracking, so we decided to take them for a drive to Half Moon Bay, the pumpkin capital of the world. It just so happened that it was the day of the annual Pumpkin Festival, so the 12 mile drive took just under 2 hours. Sarah wasn't amused, but the grandparents didn't complain once.

On the drive over, we heard a rumor that grandpas like calamari, so we stopped to see if it was true.


It was true!


Sarah can hardly wait to try some of Grandpa's calamari.

So, the visit to the Pumpkin Fest wasn't so bad after all. We never set foot in a pumpkin patch and Sarah still managed to get her very own pumpkin. How you may ask? I don't want to implicate anyone. Let's just say Mimi is very clever and has some really fast hands.


Thank you, Mimi. I won't tell the police anything.

I did some serious research into the matter, and it seems that you can't cage grandparents. They're protected by some ridiculous law - damn tree huggers! So, we had to release them back into the wild.

On their last night with us, we gave them one last meal. We had Hot Pot. (Hot Pot involves fire, wire baskets and raw food. You'll just have to visit to see for yourself.) It was delicious!


(Did I mention this was a gift from the grandparents? They're generous too.)

So, Grandpa and Mimi Fife are gone now. We miss them terribly and it leaves me wondering - who's gonna wash the dishes tonight?


Three generations of trouble...