Wow! Your whole yard is a testament to Earth Day. It's beautiful. I especially like your lettuce plates. They have such a dainty feeling to them. The napkin rings are a nice touch too. Syble, it's all so charming. Now, I shall speak to your imagined tardiness. The assignment was due today. So you are in the clear. Let me remind you, however, that waiting until the last minute is not always the wisest thing to do. As you know, I give a few extra credit points for anyone who turns their assignment in early (This helps me have a long span of time in which to correct all the assignments.) Your work has been exemplary up to this time, but you never know when those few extra points may come in handy. Back to your work - I want some stemware like yours. I have lots of dishes, but not much in the way of glasses. I'd like to start thinking about getting some with a little color. Do the goblets have the same diamond design as the snifters?

One of my duties when I worked in the Philadelphia Library was to maintain the clipping file. Every day I read a handful of local papers and clipped articles that might be useful to our patrons or staff. These papers only had a local circulation and were too small to be indexed in any of the major published indexes. This was back in the 70's before we had a computer on every desk and cubby. Retrieving a newspaper or periodical article meant locating the microfiche or microcard and using the appropriate readers. Newspapers in their original form were too fragile for long term storage unless in an archival setting - controlled temperature and humidity, light, dust and pollution free etc. In other words it was a royal P.I.A. - Any clipping that we deemed important was photocopied onto permanent paper - paper that was acid free, lignin free, and tear resistant. The link below has a lot of information of preserving newspapers and at the bottom of the article it has a link to creating archival scrapbooks too. Here is a link that might be useful: clippings

In Michigan there is a store called Griffs Shortcuts. I have only been there once, but they do offer engraved albums. They have a web page. www.griffs-shortcuts.com They are in the process of moving to another location, but I think you will be pleased with their products.

I admit I've only just scanned these posts, and I'm going to go back and read them more closely later to get all the smaller details, but I'll share my impressions based on what I've read so far: SD is in a horrible situation, as we know, with her BM's unreliable nature. Of course, Ima & her DH are in a bad bind, too, as is any parent is who has to step in and pick up another parent's slack. This tends to happen ---in varying degrees of severity--- in one way or another with almost all children of divorce. In that both parents essentially resent doing anything that smacks of what the other parent should be doing, according to them. Even in the best of situations, even when everyone involved is very nice and congenial and caring towards the child, there is bound to be some of this back-and-forth resentment and one or more of the parental figures feeling "put out" by the other. And too often the child is put in the middle of the conflict, and sometimes the resentment starts to get directed at the child, and the parents can easily underestimate how difficult that position is for the child to be in, because many children don't show their upset and sense of basic insecurity. Largely because they haven't yet reached a point in their lives where they can even comprehend it. They are thrust into a no-win situation that just isn't fair. That being said, though, it's very important for SD to begin the lifelong lesson that the number one person she can rely on in this world is herself. It's sad that she has to learn this at such a younger age than many people, but the circumstances are what they are. In the long-run, if handled well, she'll probably be better off for it later. The key distinction that I think is crucial to make in this situation is the difference between making sure SD learns to be more independent and self-reliant not because there is something wrong with HER, but because too often there is something wrong with OTHERS who will not keep their word. This doesn't have to mean either the extreme of breaking the 100% full-on truth about her deadbeat mom nor the extreme of taking the "tough love" (aka "tough s--t") approach of saying "you're 100% on your own, kid, can't help ya". There is a way to impart the helpfulness of the lesson of self-reliance without the risk of it being brutal. It should be explained to her that it's important to start to try being more self-reliant because what other people do/don't do is largely unknown and out of your control. They may or may not do what they promise, so you've got to have a backup plan because YOU are in control of what you yourself do. Explained this way, it doesn't badmouth anyone. And it also doesn't mean that ---at her young age, especially--- the situation should be such where she is truly without a lifeline if she absolutely needs it or if the circumstance at hand is larger than her capacity to deal with it. Everyone, including many fully-grown adults, needs some help every once in a while. Any steps that any adult in her life would make to help her become more self-reliant should be very clearly understood by her to be truly helpful guidance and not a punishment for having a crappy unreliable BM nor for having tried to trust this BM. As long as that is very clear, the goal should be that every year SD is alive she will learn more and more to rely on herself before anyone else. And that's another key distinction: she doesn't have to grow up and be a totally self-reliant person *overnight*. There's no need for any sudden, 'shock-and-awe' type way of teaching these lessons. Every stage of this learning process, and the well-intended reasons for it, should be totally transparent to her so that she actually feels grateful for being shown in a positive way how to cope and feel personally empowered. This way she won't develop the sense of jilted and deprived bitterness that can develop when circumstances & people thrust a person very suddenly and mercilessly into the realization that life can be brutally unfair and ---what's more--- that everyone else is too busy with their own problems to give a damn. Unfortunately, that is too many kids' introduction to the lesson of self-reliance, and it doesn't have to be that traumatic. So in a nutshell, the motto that seems very fitting for SD's main lesson from all this is: "Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst."