Weekend Recap: English is crazy; Heaven just got funnier

Language updates:

• M and I drove up to the house on Saturday after walking up to pick up the Jetta at the shop. Across-the-street neighbor Sarah was finishing up a run with Herzog, her young Lab, and we walked down the driveway to greet them. M loves dogs, but Herzog was being a bit rambunctious, and M scooted behind my leg.
  
  “Daddy, I’m scaried.”
  
  But as Herzog settled down, M’s scaried-ness subsided and we had a nice visit.

• Susan and M have been learning about calendars together (they have a big laminated calendar downstairs to which they are attaching a daily leaf, and M knows that it’s November). Nana came over yesterday and Susan asked him when his birthday was.
  
  “March twentieth!” he said, and then, to illustrate, he got up and “Marched” around the front porch (in his button down shirt and Bob-the-Builder underwear, I should point out).

• B, in the meantime, is using his communication skills more and more. He chats all the time, and this last week realized that screaming works for happy as well as sad. So now his Expressions of Joy repertoire includes the scream as well as the now passé smile and giggle.
  
  Of course, then comes the volume-testing stage. So all week he tested loud screams and medium screams. (Quiet screams were dismissed early on in the process as ineffective.)
  
  Sometimes, when B talks, M will report to us:
  
  B: mmammabmababbaaaaaeeee.
  M: B’s talkin’.
  Parent: What’s he saying?
  M: The ABC’s.
  
  But yesterday, with the Screams of Joy, it went like this:
  
  B: AAIGHMMMBBBBAAAMM!
  M: B’s talkin’.
  Parent: What’s he saying?
  M: AAIGHMMMBBBBAAAMM!

And From the New Arrivals Department:

This weekend is Paw Paw’s first weekend in heaven. Paw Paw is my maternal grandfather, M&B’s great-grandfather.

Paw Paw is a jokester, so if heaven could get any funnier, it just did. Paw Paw is one of those people that expresses his joy in God’s world and in His oddest creation (people) by being goofy.

The earliest prank I know of was during Paw Paw’s short stint in college, when he and his chums soaped up the railroad tracks near their dorm so that the locomotive kept slipping back down the hill. According to the story, the engineer finally had to back up a good mile and a half to get a running start.

The latest joke I’m aware of was seventy-plus years later, in the assisted-living apartments. Walking by the beauty parlor one day, he had a brainstorm and stopped in. At dinner that night, cafeteria was abuzz with talk of the flirty new ninety-year-old widow, wearing my Grandmother’s best dress, an attractive wig, and a little too much mascara.

More on this later, but suffice it to say that my Grandmother has kept her eye-rolling muscles very active for the 71 years of their marriage.

“Oh, Greg.”