Wow! Lucky you! KitchenAid is expensive. I have a KitchenAid Accolade 400 mixer and I truly love it! All those recipes I have that call for constant hand stirring are now a breeze with this!! I also have a KitchenAid wide mouth food processor and the love affair continues! This was so helpful when I made pickles as it slices them in a matter of seconds! I love this food processor on Thanksgiving and even just for slicing potatoes to fry :) The mixer and food processor are the very best investment I ever made for my kitchen. As my sister said, "Every woman deserves a KitchenAid." Amen!

I think we should go back to supporting those of us who are estranged from our adult children. I realize that everyone is not honest and some people are posting as multiple people, but we can chose to ignore posts that we do not believe in and perhaps as in the case of Anniebal/Becky understand that maybe the hurt she feels may have made her do something she now realizes wasn't the right thing to do. She did apologize and admitted to making a mistake. She does however feel deep pain from the estrangement of her adult child and, to me, at least was desperate to find a way to make sense of a crazy, irrational situation. I know I suffer from depression because of this and do feel desperation at times. I, for one, am a legitimate person with one user ID who has tried to be honest about my feelings of hurt and betrayal due to a 3 year estrangement from my only son. I for one appreciate a forum to help me get a handle on the pain I feel in my heart on a daily basis. I appreciate suggestions and ideas on ways to improve my quality of life and perhaps even end the estrangement. It is also helpful to not feel so alone as this is not a situation many Psychologists or Therapists understand. I have been to many and ultimately once they can't help, they resort to the typical answer of "get a hobbie and move on with your life". Unfortuately, as many of you know this is easier said than done. I would like to hear form children who have estranged their parents for no apparent reason to help understand why, why they can not sit down with their parents and have a rational conversation about the reasons and ways to make things better and if there is anything a parent can do to make things better. I for one would give anything to even have a one time phone call with an honest reason for the estrangement. I only know the cruel things his GF has said and written. I have to admit that I may not have always responded kindly to her cruelty, but it appears her plan was to alientate and have our son alientate us and anyone from his past permanently for many years. I watched it happen slowly, helplessly before my eyes. I tried to talk with my son about it, stating my husband and I were willing to do what it takes to make her like us. He did not want to discuss it and the most he would say is there is nothing we could do. I was upset that the GF he chose to be serious about hated us. No matter how kind we were she seemed to find fault in everything we did, even the kind things. And dare we defend ourselves after she attacked us. She now has complete control of his email which we finally blocked to prevent her unkind responses. No matter what we said: kind, apologetic, extending an olive branch, a new vague reason would be given by her for the estrangement. Her father isn't even willing to help us as he likes having our son as his own. He is a single parent and likes having a "son" so he lies to us and does everything in his power to prevent us from being able to talk to our son. Our son seems afaid of his girlfriend leaving him and it appears she has given him an ultimatum us or her. After dating a short time, she informed my husband that anything he said to our son he needed to say to her as well. This is his first girlfriend and he knows nothing different. He doesn't see that he is a good catch and doesn't need a controlling GF. I have to admit, that he has always been somewhat immature socially and often did ask for our advice in college in areas he should have been able to handle himself. I am not sure other than guiding him to make his own decisions, how we could have changed that about him. Again, I contantly think coulda, shoulda, woulda, but if this was her plan form the beginning, anything we did would have made no difference. Her mother left her when she was 3 and she seems to project her feelings about her mother on to me. She also has no friends and in the 7 years that I have known her had never had any friends except our son. Once he was 18 and away at college, we enncouraged him to make his own decisions, but she was always there to tell him what to do. It seems like even though he has a Master's degree and able to hold down a $100,000 a year job successfully, he needs her socially. She allows him no friends, he even told me he hated this, yet in the end once he was financially independent, he chose her and estranged us. This occurred about 3 years ago, after he completed his bachelors degree shich we paid for. He receive a compete scholarship with stipend for his Masters. This is when the estrangement started. I've tried to be kind to her, but she is unforgiving of even the littlest things. I agree with a previous poster, I think Ginny, that there is nothing one can do until the child decides to end the estrangement. In the mean time or if this never happens a forum, like this is a blessing, giving those of us who are legitimate a place to feel safe to share our feelings. We are experiencing the grief process as if our children are dead. Sometimes, and I don't mean to be cruel, but at times I think an estrangement seems worse than the death of a child (not to minimize that pain), but with an estrangement a parent continues to have hope so there is no final step of acceptance as it is difficult to give up hope of a reconcliation. I never want to lose hope that he our son will realize that he is being controlled and that we were in fact good parents with his best interests at heart. I don't feel this is a forum to judge, but to share and help each other to deal with a situation that others in our neighborhoods/communities can not relate to or at least do not openly admit. Please let's stop the bickering, lets ignore the responses we feel are not legitimate and be there for each other. WE are all at different stages of the grieving process and our feelings of hurt and pain probably change daily depending on the type of day we are having. I personally have a difficult time seeing my friends who have good relationship with their grown children and grandchildren. I would give anything just to have any direct contact with my son that did not have to go through his GF or her father who do not appear to have his best interest at heart. They will not even except an apology and say we are stalkers if we want to talk to them about resolving the situation. I think of stalkers as dangerous people. All my husband and I want is an honest open discussion with our son that is not filtered through a people who only say bad often untrue things about us. Even if he says his GF has given him an ultimatum and doesn't want to have anything to do with us. I want to know why that would prevent a phone call, email, visit or any type of contact with us or his 84 year old grandmother. If she wants nothing to do with us, why should that prevent him from making some type of contact without her== at least to have enough courtesty to give us a reason for the estrangement. I wonder how many years this will go on, will he contact us he breaks up with her will he have the courage to break up with her, will they marry, will I have grandchildren that I will never see. Why does his GF hate us when we have tried to be nothing, but kind to her and have apologized for things we didn't realize upset her. She will not accept any apology and basically told us we were crap, pieces of dirt. How can she love our son and hate us? Isn't the way a child treats his mother an indication of how he will treat his GF/wife? She and her father say they can not believe that he is such a good person with such terrible parents. They give us no credit. We spent years putting his interests ahead of ours as parents do. This is not to say my husband and I did not have a good realtionship. I so appreciate the support, ideas, suggestions of people who can truly empathize with this situation or those who can give insight as to what may have happened, but arguments and people posting who have not walked in our shoes should find another more appropriate forum. We have such little support, please give us the opportunity to help each other deal with one of the most difficult situations a parent can face. As some one pointed out, unless you walked in the shoes you don't know what it truly feels like. I never in a million years would have thought this could happen to us. Two months before it happened, our son called us upset and wanting to break up with this girl, how were we to know two months later he would move in with her and refuse to see, talk to , email, visit, no contact!!! except cruel emails, phone calls from the GF and her father. Our son has remained completely silent! Is he afraid of her? Is he ashamed of what he has done to us? Is he afraid she will find out if her contacts us? I don't even think he is aware of the unkind things she is doing, but am certain she never shows him our kind emails and tells him bits and pieces to make us look bad. The last we heard from her is to only call if someone is dead! She didn't even tell him his grandmother was in the hospital for a possible stroke. Just a request to use this forum of the right reason. I admit. Losing my son has made me a little obsessive. I am willing to do just about anything to speak to him and try to understand what happened. We are all at different stages and should try to help those we can relate to and have walked in their shoes. Thanks

ColorMe, the systems have been funky lately. Interestingly enough, the movement of tectonic plates was embraced earliest by some very strange people of the Von Daniken ilk (but a decade earlier.) I read all those books and enjoyed them mainly because they gave me permission to think about things in a new way. Most of what I read I didn't believe or agree with, but for some reason the plate tectonics stuff held. So, by reading some incredibly stupid book probably about the hollow earth, I learned enough about plate tectonics to dazzle a geologist with my learning a decade or so later. Go figure. Of course I've also learned enough stuff that is dead wrong to cure anyone's bedazzlement. My vote for the worst non-ficion would be the biography Sara & Gerald, of her parents Sara and Gerald Murphy by daughter Honoria Donnelly. These two incredibly interesting and exciting characters (according to two biographies Living Well is the Best Revenge by Calvin Tomkins and Everyone Was So Young by Amanda Vail) gave birth to a daughter who made them sound dull as ditch water.

I read both fiction and non-fiction. usually have one or two of ech type going at the same time. Often a fiction book will get me to go into more depth of a subject-- ie i read a bio of jos. banks while reading patrick o'brian's sea-adventures that master and commander movie was based on. just one to many references to banks, made me dig up a bio to fit him into the books i was reading-- that lead to reading the botany of desire. right now i'm working on wincheseter's book about the 1906 san fransisco earthquake that i came a cross while looking thru the 'new non-fiction' section at our library. I read the horatio hornblower novels to compary to obrian's and edded up reading a book about tamenny (sp)hall in new york which caused me to read a bio of john adams, and because we were going to washington a read a history of 'clover' adams too. strange on how books will lead you on a thread of reading. I'm finishing peter tremayne's mystery series of sister fidelma in 7th cent ireland, no idea where that will take me, but it prompted me to pick-up books on celtic knotwork. so i read and read and read, obscure references lead me from place to place. diggerb