total bliss

I just found this picture of my grand niece on my nephew and his wife's website. If this isn't total serenity, I don't know what would be. Welcome to the world of ice cream, sweetheart. She had just had a good tasting of it. I love that sweet innocent little face. She is so interested in learning about the world.

And I just got a whole lesson in familial relationships, and how. While I was brushing my teeth and talking to my husband who was settling in to bed I asked him what the difference is between a Great Niece and a Grand Niece. He, who has NO clue about how family connections are figured out, started telling me that if she was younger then me...well, something something...if she were older than me the she would be the Grand Niece. He based this reasoning on the fact that Grandparents are older. He is wise, my man.

So, to settle my mind about the whole grand-great debate I googled it. OH LORD....you have NO idea what is out there about relationships. My mind was spinning and and my eyes were rolling after looking at some of the charts. This one is a doozy!! It has an enormous chart detailing any possible relationship to anyone ever who is remotely related to you. Definitely worth a click just to see the thing. Man, someone went crazy figuring that out.

Then there was the slightly odd website that was very serious about relationships on Prince Edward Island. Wikipedia had this to say, "According to the 2008 estimates, Prince Edward Island has 139,407 residents[3] collectively referred to as Islanders. " I guess with that small a gene pool one must be most rigorous in selecting someone from the Island, or possibly all of Nova Scotia.

I didn't used to get too interested in how my family was related to each other...there just weren't that many of us. That is the deal with my husband, he was an only child, too. (My sister has gotten that name for her website, so be on the lookout) So, anything other than a cousin was pretty exotic for us and after thinking on the relationship for a nano second we were back into our own little worlds, where we were king and queen. And we lived in a very large metropolitan area where we were not likely to marry anyone remotely related to us, so it just wasn't all that important to us. But now, I'm getting older and there are more and more of us after the first influx of my siblings. Same dad...different mother. And now they have children and grandchildren and our world has grown so much and become complex.

After all the reading, grand niece and great niece are the same thing, but ain't she grand!! Anyway, I wanted to show you Miss Lilly in all her loveliness at age 7 months 21 days, with ice cream face and wide eyes. Keep this image with you today as you go about your business and I think it will make you a little happier.

Disclaimer-I did make sure it was ok with her grandmother to use this image and grandmothers are the toughest.