However, I must admit I’m agog with curiosity – what on earth do you do? Inhale the bacon through a straw? That would actually be a pretty neat trick.

Your in-laws sound like complete and utter jerks, and I’m glad your sweetie actually knows it, and doesn’t plan to subject you to them.

Twistie, I have to say I REALLY WONDER about the mothers and mothers-in-law who turn up in white dresses at their children’s weddings. The only message I can deduce is “I want to sleep with my son!” Total ick. (And “I want to sleep with my son-in-law!” isn’t exactly an improvement.)

When my brother the alpaca rancher married his lady, her family was…well, they did manage to stop slightly short of public fist fights, but that’s about as much as I can say to the good. In the end, her father made a series of demands about what the wedding needed to be like before he would consider attending, and then simply failed to show on the big day. Her mother, OTOH, did show and we sort of wished she hadn’t. I mean, who comes to her only daughters’ wedding dressed in a lacy white long dress and then deliberately scowls in every photograph?

In the end, though, both parents managed mostly to make gigantic jackasses of themselves. More than twenty years later, people see the photo album and have a good laugh at scowly mom in her demi-wedding gown. They also note daddy’s absence and tut tut a lot.

Don’t let the door hit ya! I told him to tell them. Unfortunately, through a series of unfortunate events, he was able to convince them to come.

So they spent nine days with us, sleeping in our room because they cannot take stairs, complaining that my husband was not spending enough time with them, even though he had told them he was going to have to work two of the days they were here, whining that the TV was in the basement and they couldn’t watch (even though they are intellectuals so you’d think they could entertain themselves for TWO DAYS without a TV), would I get them Lactaid for their lactose intolerance (yes), oh can they eat a lot of our (we don’t get the cheap stuff so we eat if sparingly) cheese for a snack at 5:00 (where is the lactose intolerance?) because we don’t eat lunch dear, we expect a full meal at 8 and we don’t like her but why is she going to bed at 9:30?

They drank a gallon of bourbon in six days, plus at least a bottle of wine at supper every night. They were drunk at our wedding supper, but at least didn’t insult anyone in my family or my husband’s pastor (they are ardent atheists) as far as I know, although in their toast, managed to subtly insult me by omission. My brother and sister each gave a toast welcoming my husband to the family and saying how happy they were to have him. My FIL said he hoped my husband would be as happy as FIL is, which is damning with faint praise. Never mentioned me by name. Whatev.

One of my husband’s Christmas presents this year was the promise that I don’t have to go visit them at all in 2009. They’ll never come back here. Ever. And fortunately, they drink heavily and are in poor health, so. You know.