FYI, it would be a good idea to include the Postgres version. plpython has been undergoing a lot of changes recently, so it would help to peg where you are at in that sequence.
Ah, I see it now:
"All other data types, including the PostgreSQL character string types, are converted to a Python str."
Thanks (as an aside Postgres 9.3 and python 2.7)
I find dateutil(https://labix.org/python-dateutil) a handy package to have in this situation. Use parse() from the parser module to do the heavy lifting of converting from a string into a date/datetime object.
