Well, leave it to that little snip, J.T....she would come visit at the most busy time of the yr for you! Congrats on back to college & back to the classroom at school! Hope she didn't give you too many headaches! We'll be looking forward to hearing about your adventures! Where will JT be flying next? TFS her arrival! Jeanne S.

The grade school I attended in the 1940's was still there when I was last in town....my father went to grade school there as did my grandfather...and it had a big bell too, but in my memory I never heard it ring. There was a Jr High in the "complex" that had been the high school, before the new high school was built about 1928. We ran (in an orderly fashion of course)across the school yard to the auditorium for assemblies. Only cold lunch was an option, you brought your own and ordered milk, or you went home for lunch. In Jr High you could run across the yard to the highschool cafeteria and buy either hot or cold lunch, or eat your own sandwich and buy milk. My friends and I soon discovered that leaving school, we could peek into the window to the cafeteria and read what was on the menu for lunch and make up our mind to bring or buy. We had snow days. I remember specifically several. One in particular when I didn't get the word and slogged to school only to find it closed. Way back when, girls wore snow pants or even a show suit. we tucked our skirts into the snow pants, put on our boots, coats, hats, mittens and away we went. I remember one girl always left her skirt hanging out of her snow pants. I thought it looked strange...most girls tucked them in. For "good" you had leggins, with a zipper up the side of the leg and a sort of "spat" thing over the foot. Neat, tailored, unlike wool snow pants. With the leggins you had a matching coat, orten trimmed with velvet and a matching hat. Very spiffy and an expensive extravagance for Sunday School and birthday parties or going to aunt Norma's for Thanksgiving. Big girls didn't wear snow pants, we just froze. We wore white rubber boots, looking very much like majorette boots and bare knees and a below the knee coat. And walking to school, with that hard rubber boot made a very rough, sore spot on the back or your calf. I swear sometimes it took until June for for that scar to heal up. We had 2 sets of monkey bars....we called them jungle gyms...we had a set for boys and a set for girls. We played war ( remember the times!) and prisoner of war, kick ball, red rover, dodge ball and I remember in 7th grade playing mumblety peg for weeks and weeks at lunch recess. Can you imagine now if someone brought a knife with a 4 inch blade to school? I learned to write with a black pen holder with a removable point and an inkwell which sat in my desk to dip into. In the supply closet was a large bottle of Schaffer ink that was used to fill th ink wells. Somewhere around 5th grade we were allowed to use a fountain pen, but not a ball point! Horrors! By 7th grade we were allowed to use ball point, but they were messy and leaked and left oily globs on your papers, and teachers hated them. I used a fountain pen through high school and college and even after for writing letters and signing cards etc. No one had pierced ears...no one! At least not until high school and then a few did, mostly Italian girls, they they wore simple gold hoops. I thought they were wonderful and one of the first pair of earrings I bought after getting my ears pierced was a pair of small gold hoops. And 25 years later, when my daughter went to grade school, she still wasn't allowed to wear slacks to school until 6th grade when they lifted the ban....and she wasn't allowed to carry a purse to school...figure that one. A couple of years back my grand daughter was writing a paper on family history and how things were "in the olden days" LOL! She wanted to know what we did without TV...I told her we had TV!! She wondered how old I was when we got electricity? I told her that I always had electricity and so did my mother from the time she could remember! Indoor plumbing?? Yep...had that too! I thinks he was disappointed! However, there are mind bending changes in this last 25 years. Can you imagine my children telling their grand children how they had to go to the library to research a term paper?? LOL! Linda C

FDH will have a talk to the school counselor first and discuss what they can do, I don't know if CPS is an option. We have rang them before and they investigated but didn't think there was a problem. But we'll see after he spoke to the school counselor. As for lonepipers question, BM never used to allow the kids to ring FDH on the phone. And when FDH tried to ring them she got the home phone disconnected. Seriously. When they went back to court in '08 she got it re-connected. SHe also gave kids mobile phone at young age to take to our place so she can ring them on it (even though we never not allow her to talk to them and she'll ring and keep them talking for 2 hours..). At her place they used to have to hand the mobiles back and she switched them off. Now that the kids are a bit older it's harder to not allow them to ring FDH, but she's discouraged it for so many years that the kids just don't seem to want to make the effort anymore. They also know intuitively that there's consequences if they do initiate a call (puts BM in bad mood). So they don't ring FDH, unless BM enourages because BM needs to know something. As for FDH ringing them, he rings them every Tuesday and he did so this time as well. But SD13 didn't tell him that she was not at school. The therapist we saw advised FDH to try and keep a routine for ringing the kids, this way it's easier on the kids because it's predictable and BM will get used to it over time so there's no fall-out after the phonecall. So this is what FDH is doing. He rings them on Tuesday and sees them on the Thursday when he picks SD12 up for her guitar lesson. Also then he wasn't aware that SD13 was not going to school. It's not him who's not caring enough or not bothered, it's BM who's making them keep secrets. Very hard to prove something like that. But if you were here with us for a period of time and you would see it for yourself I bet you'd still find it hard to believe. I do.

I seriously JUST went through this porblem with my SD who is in 6th grade. she had D's until two weeks ago. The habits that you are describing are exactly what my SD was doing. (So it makes me wonder if some of it is not normal preteen rebelion) I got an email from her teacher in Performing Arts that she right now had a D in her class because she wasn't turning in her forms at all. OMG WHO gets t a D in drama class!!!!!!! SO I will tell you what we did, I may get reamed by some as being mean, but it worked, she has brought up all grades to A's and B's in two weeks!!!!!!!! Drastic times call for drastic measures and I had flat out had enough..this is what I did: I went in her room while she was at school and removed everything (tv,DS etc..) including clothes, but her bed, dresser (that i took everything out of), comforter, pillows,sheets, some posters on the wall.... I put it all in the guest room. On her bed I layed out 5 pair of jeans,undies, tshirts and socks and one hoodie. I picked the ugliest tshirts I could find (one of them said "im the big sister" imagine wearing THAT to middle school! When she came home we sat her down, and told her that we are required to provide her with a roof over her head, food, basic clothing etc.. but WE WERE NOT required to give her electronics, the latest fashionable clothes etc....To us those are privelages, and as of today she had none because of bad grades.... her grades were her responsibility, and obviously she didn't care enough about her grades so we would help her care. We told her it was all up to her she could either sink or swim, We told her that it was now her responsibilty to make sure work was turned in, that homework was complete, and the whole 9 yards, that we were there if she needed help but we WERE NOT going to hound her any more. then we took her to her room, and told her that she was going to need to earn her cool stuff back and her cool clothes by gettint good grades or she would forver live in her room just like this, and wash and wear the same five pairs of clothes that we had provided for her. We told her that for every good grade she brought home she would get an item that she picked back. (with the clothes, we gave her like 5 items for a good grade.) and if she brought a bad grade home we were gonna take something else away. She cried in her room for like an hour (i am sure she thought we were the worst parents on the planet) low and behold, it is two weeks later and she has not brought one bad grade home. She has also earned all of her stuff back. I think the biggest thing for her, was that she needed to want to get good grades for herself, SHE needed to find the motivation within herself to do good for her. Have you ever heard the expression you don't know what you have lost until its gone? sometimes, you have to lose everything to figure out what needs to get done. So that was what we did, and I absolutely don't regret it one bit. She has busted her butt not for us but for HER. don't get me wrong, it was hard to see her cry, and I did feel a twinge when she went to school with the big sister shirt on, BUT it was tough love, and I don't forsee her EVER bringing home a bad grade unless she can help it..she now knows we mean business. The main thing though is if you do something drastic like that you have to be able to really stick to your guns and not bend....it was hard to convince hubby to do this, he was worried she would feel like the red headed step child, but he also realized we had pretty much tried everything else, and if things didn't improve she was going to fail..so he agreed and now has no regrets either. We also grounded her permanently until all her grades were c or above...