I was sad when Guiding Light and then As the World Turns went off air. I remember being a young teen, and coming to my Grandmother's house to care for my Nana (great-grandmother). Nana was OK for a few hours on her own, but my grandmother worked, and during the summer I would walk to her house and stay with Nana. She was about 88 at that time, but goodness! she loved her "stories"! So while I didn't watch them for years, GL and ATWT were my third generation soaps. My mother watched them, too. I picked them up again when we moved here. My son was just barely 2 years, daycare was hideous, so I stayed home. Those soaps came on during nap time, LOL. That was 23 years ago. I didn't watch religiously, but I did enjoy them. I certainly preferred them to the other daytime programming. The genre seems to be going away. I can understand, because while a soap will pull in a couple of million viewers, so will a talk show. But the talk show is much cheaper to produce.

Pennylane-- I don't want to be guilty of encouraging you to flout the advice of your counselor (who is a professional, and I of course am not), but I would encourage you to discuss with him the idea of you dealing with SD directly when it comes to the more vague issues of "attitude" and "respect". With appropriate assertiveness (not passiveness or aggressiveness) and without meting out "punishments" per se, but more of a *discussion* with her. Run it by him and see if he might reconsider his advice somewhat. I say this, again, not because I am in a position to have an "expert" opinion on blended families, but because I am a stepdaughter, and one common thread among other stepchildren I know is that the SP/SK relationship is made so much worse when it is perceived that one or more parties is being "manipulative" or is untrustworthy, and this perception results from an INDIRECT approach. Whether it's the SK or the SP doing it, it spells the beginning of the end for a decent relationship. You don't want to risk creating an impression to your SD that you are two-faced, passive-aggressive or are "hiding behind" your DH and expecting him to fix all of your interpersonal problems (including the one with SD) for you. Aside from eroding trust and encouraging similarly indirect behavior on SD's part, I dare say it also undermines the very thing you seek to improve in the situation: her respect for you. I can honestly say that the number one factor that has made me fully give up on having any sense of respect for my SM or any desire to "work with her" is exactly this sort of thing. If she had had the guts to actually TELL ME if/when something I did/said/was upset her, instead of resorting to the little digs (with a big grin) she felt were her only permitted recourse to express her displeasure with me, I would have seen her as not only a person worth respecting but also as an honest human being who I'd WANT to be close to. It was very hard for me to see her as a fully-formed ADULT WOMAN when she was constantly "tattling" to my Dad about whatever her grievances were. Moreover, in her case she drastically distorted the things she relayed to him which painted me in the worst possible light, and since these things were never discussed with ME directly, I had no chance to explain (or in certain cases just plain CORRECT) some of the misperceptions, so it was pretty much impossible to see her as trustworthy or as an agent of anything other than discord in my relationship with my father. Therefore, she never earned my genuine respect, nor my desire to "work with her" even though her tantrums to MY DAD made it so I was terrified for years to do or say anything to upset the apple cart. So she got her surface compliance out of my stuffing myself for years, but it certainly didn't improve ---and in fact severely worsened--- anything deeper between us than the shallowest "hi, how's it going"/"oh, fine..." And I dare say I don't think it helped her relationship with my Dad. For several reasons, but one of them being that expecting him to "fix" something that is so inherently vague and emotional and open to perception as "attitude" and "respect" is pretty much impossible, and no one knows this more than the bio-parent in the middle. It's one thing to have clear rules/consequences for clear actions or infractions. For example, an eye-roll is clear enough to be called out ***IF HE SEES IT HAPPEN***... But the problem comes in when/if it happens when he is not around, due to the underlying distrust and disrespect which will be made no better by the "hiding behind DH" approach. Please at least run this by your counselor. I'm not a professional, but I did experience this from the other side, and I think if you ask other adult SK's on here they'll agree with me.

May_flowers: Good grief....I need a nap. I can't even keep my own posts straight!!! Lol I will be keeping an eye out for slabs that are whiter, and preferably honed. Unfortunately our local stone yards are saying they've been having trouble getting good slabs. Also, armed with a little bit if knowledge from karin_mt, I'm starting to notice that a lot of the very white quartzite available to me is really mislabeled marble. :-/

Here, too. Two that I know of are being charged with making terroristic threats. One made a video. Kids I know told me a high-schooler had a visit at school from police who took him away for making a written threat complete with target student names. One of the names was a close friend of the girl who told me about this. The named child said she did not even know the threatener. This has not hit the news, though it happened right after Parkland. I have a friend who is a teacher in the same school system and she told me kids bring guns to school more often than we hear about, but that they show it to another kid or two-- who tell an adult right away.