The wedding festivities for my sister-in-law kicked off Friday morning with an event that can best be described as

Pre-Wedding Brunching With Engineers

It all started off innocently enough, with a brunch meant to welcome my husband’s uncle. He had recently arrived in town from Israel, which is the fourteenth country in which he’s lived.

He had called my sister-in-law earlier in the week to discuss his final travel arrangements, and she told him that at first she wasn’t sure she should take his call, since the number was so odd-looking on her caller ID.

Naturally this led right into a competition designed to see who could identify the most country codes, because if there is a better way to get into the mood for a wedding, I surely don’t know about it.

So different people (read: the three engineers) started calling out random questions for the rest of the group.

“What’s Israel’s country code?”

“What’s ours?”

“How about Italy’s?”

“Ah!” shouted The International Uncle, in the tone of someone who has just successfully squared the circle. “What’s Kosovo’s country code?!”

Shockingly, no one knew the answer to this question.

“Ha ha,” revealed The International Uncle, that trickster. “They don’t have one. They have to use Serbia’s. And, boy-are they miffed.”

(Yukking laughter from the three engineers, who frankly, could not possibly imagine anything more humorous than this.)

Me and the bride: (looking desperately at each other to communicate the urgent messages of “Please help me!”, and “How can we STOP THE INSANITY RIGHT NOW?!)

And so that pretty much set the tone for the rest of the weekend.

Eventually we did make it through the rest of that day, until finally it was time for

The Wedding Rehearsal

In the spirit of celebration, as well as the spirit of, “Well, I might have to wear a tux tomorrow, but tonight I can wear whatever I want, mwa ha ha ha ha!” my father-in-law, who plays the bagpipes, decided to adorn himself in full, bag piping attire. When I tell you that he is over six feet tall and was wearing a kilt the color of pumpkins, you will understand why that caused such a big stir.

As the rehearsal was winding down he came over to talk to me and my husband, which gave me the opportunity to ask him why he appeared to have a small purse strapped around his midsection.

“Is that where you keep your flask in case all of this wedding stuff gets to be too much?” I joked.

It turns out that it is something called a “sporran”, and while I suppose you could use it to store your flask, he was using his to store his wallet and his keys.

“Now there are some sporrans that are encrusted with gems, or that are covered in goat hair,” my father-in-law informed us. “So technically, mine is not actually an evening sporran.”

I’m pretty sure he was able to slide by on that one.

My husband and I are both very much word people. We love to read, and we often make up our own words and phrases when we talk to each other. And now that he is having to learn Spanish for his job, we often throw in some foreign words to give our conversation a little international flair.

But sometimes I forget this fact, like today when we were opening Christmas gifts with his family.

It is their tradition that we all sit in a circle and open gifts one person at a time, so everyone can admire what everyone else receives. This means that before each round of gift opening, one person is assigned to retrieve gifts from under the tree, making sure that everyone has something to open.

This time it was my mother-in-law’s turn to play Santa, and she was having trouble finding a present for me.

“Oh wait,” she said finally, “this one might be for you, Jenny.”

She held the gift out at arm’s length, squinted at the tag, and then asked, “Are you…’queasy’?”

“Um, no,” I replied, thinking that she was asking about my illness. Then I had an idea.

“Do you mean ‘queso’?” I asked.

“Oh yes, ‘queso’,” agreed my mother-in-law.

“Yep,” I said, holding out my hand. “That one is definitely for me.”

Recently I was talking to my mom about my cousin, who just had her first child. Everyone is fine now, but apparently she experienced some pretty severe complications during and after the birth.

Despite all the problems, “apparently she’s going to do it again one day,” said my mom.

Me (shuddering): No thank you!

My Mom: Well, you can just adopt all your children.

Me: I’m not having children.

My Mom: Well, you can just adopt them like at age 3, after all the messy stuff’s out of the way.

Me: It’s not just the birth-it’s the having them around all the time that I don’t want. I like being free. I like that I can pick up and go at anytime. I’m like a gypsy.

Explosive, hysterical laughter from the other end of the phone.

My Mom (heavily sarcastic): A gypsy with a Blackberry.

Me: I didn’t say I wasn’t well-connected. I just said that I was free.

Today is my birthday (YAY!), and to celebrate I went to North Carolina last weekend to see my family.

My brother and his wife were there, and as a couple who have been married a little over a year they were discussing all the various adjustments they have been going through as newlyweds. Apparently sleep has been kind of an issue for them, as one of them goes to sleep and stays in the same position all night, and one of them moves around in their sleep. A Lot.

My brother described it in the following way:

“Are you familiar with Restless Leg Syndrome?” he asked us.

We were.

“Well, we’ve decided that [my sister-in-law] has Restless Existence Syndrome.”

(The phone rings. It’s my parents.)

My dad: “Jennifer! I need to talk to you RIGHT! NOW!”

Me (sitting down, just in case): “OK.”

My dad: “Are you familiar with a product called ‘Vera Mist’?”

Me (realizing that it’s OK to relax, yet not entirely sure where this is going): “Um, no.”

My dad: “Well, your mother and I were just watching TV and we saw a commercial for it. Apparently it’s a new nasal spray.”

Me: “Hm.”

My dad: “And you know how they have all that small print at the bottom of the screen, like ‘Not for use for children under 12′ and things like that?”

Me: “Yeah.”

My dad: “Well, one of the disclaimers said-and I swear, this is exactly what it said-’It is not entirely known how Vera Mist works.’

Me: (now in dire need of some Vera Mist myself, due to all the snorts of laughter.)

My dad (imitating a marketing executive): “Yeah, we don’t actually know what our product does. But why don’t you just go ahead and squirt it right up your nose anyway? Near your brain!”

Last weekend my husband and I went to visit my brother and sister-in-law as part of the official start of our summer vacation. They both have their own laptops, but apparently my brother insists on keeping his in its virginal, pristine condition by refusing to allow anyone to download anything onto it from the Internet. So anytime this need appears, my sister-in-law’s computer is pressed into service.

It’s a good thing they’d told me about this on an earlier visit. Because otherwise, the conversation I overheard between them would’ve been even more disconcerting than it already was:

My sister-in-law: “So, where’s ‘The Whore’?”

My brother (looking around, completely unconcerned): “Um, I think she’s in the bedroom.”

As I am a rather “artsy-fartsy” girl and my husband is an engineer, it is not surprising that we have very different communication styles:

-he enjoys finding ways to turn everyday situations into helpful, instructive math problems; I enjoy finding ways to turn everyday situations into sarcastic, snark-laden posts for my blog which allow for the frequent use of words like “ass” and “bongjillion”, as well as the breaking of every grammar rule known to man.

-he describes his world in precise, easy to understand terms like, “My ear hurts.”; I am incapable of communicating without the assistance of exaggeration and hyperbole as in, “There is a monkey drumming through my eardrum with a nail that has been heated to the white-hot intensity of a thousand suns!”

-I view everything in life as either the best, most amazing thing EVER! or the worst possible travesty ever to be inflicted upon mankind for which someone deserves to DIE!; the most common level of emotional reaction to a situation to which he is willing to commit is, “perhaps”.

So needless to say, we’ve had to work to find some common communication ground.

Through some unfortunate trial and error my husband has learned that if I ever send him the following text message:

I HATE EVERYONE AND EVERYTHING!

that he must drop whatever he is doing and perform an immediate intervention, so as to prevent me from sending a piece of our electronic equipment to its fiery doom.

However we have managed to find one area of mutual understanding and that area is, of course, the scale by which we determine The Urgency Of Our Need To Pee, as measured in Units Of Riley.

Riley is my in-laws’ little Cairn Terrier, and he is famous in the family both for the amount of pee he can contain within his tiny, canine body, as well as the intensity with which he can release it. And so being the kind of people that we are, people who notice the random, goofy crap that most people miss, people who like to bring up private, bodily functions in everyday conversation so as to horrify our mothers, we naturally took advantage of Riley’s urinary prowess and coined the phrase, “peeing like Riley”.

And so, while we may differ on which is the preferred political party, and we may disagree on whether or not women should be allowed to be priests, and we may be worlds apart when it comes to deciding whether a given song should be classified as “country” or “Southern rock”, when one or the other of us proclaims,

“Dude! I’ve gotta pee like 5 Rileys!”

Our minds are one.

This past weekend my mother celebrated her 60th birthday. My parents threw a huge party that included relatives from both sides of the family, lots of friends, and members of the families that my brother and I married into.

At some point during the party my dad looked down and happened to notice that the pants he was wearing had acquired some tears and frayed edges, so he started joking about taking up a “love offering” from the guests in order to cover the cost of some new clothes.

(For those of you who are not recovering Baptists, a “love offering” is a special, voluntary collection taken up whenever a guest pastor or visiting musical group participates in a church’s worship service.)

My sister-in-law and her fiance were among the first guests to leave, and as they were making their way to the door my dad caught up with them, huddled them together over in a corner of the kitchen, and with an absolutely straight face told them that he was giving all of the party guests an opportunity to contribute to his special “love offering”.

My sister-in-law’s fiance immediately jumped back about 3 feet, with a look of absolute horror on his face.

“Oh, I guess you’ve never been to a Baptist church,” my mom said, puzzled by his reaction.

“No, I’m Catholic,” he said.

So we explained to him our idea of a “love offering”, and he relaxed a bit.

“Never sneak up on me again and start whispering about a ‘love offering’,” he said, shaking his head. “For a minute there I thought I was gonna have to do something I’d have to repent of later.”

This past weekend I went up to North Carolina to visit my family. I spent a night with my brother and sister-in-law who just got married last summer and are settling into their own domestic routine.

They talked about how they don’t really get out so much anymore, now that they’re married, and I said that the same thing had happened to me and my husband too. Then my sister-in-law said to my brother, “Ooh, tell Jenny what you got last weekend.”

“Oh yeah!” said my brother, brightening.

I looked at my brother expectantly, excited to hear what had gotten the two of them so excited.

“I got a new pair of nasal hair trimmers” my brother exclaimed. “It was the best Saturday night ever!”

Yesterday after the wedding we all went back to the hotel to change clothes before heading over to a post-wedding party at my aunt and uncle’s house. As we were waiting for our group to gather in the lobby we started talking about some of the cousins who weren’t able to attend the wedding, and my 13-year-old cousin asked how much older they are than she is.

“Oh, I know,” I said, and then proceeded to list off the birth years of the cousins in question. “I know when everyone was born. [First cousin] was 1971, then me in 1972,…” and then continued through cousin #12 who was born in 2001.”

“Hm,” replied my aunt. I thought at first that she was impressed by my vast repository of family knowledge until she turned to my husband and asked, “So, what’s it like being married to Monk?”