Kept woman does sound sexy, but DH would laugh if I said it because nobody could ever "keep" me outside of my will. I'm certainly not a Domestic Goddess. Martha Stewart and Bree Hodge would never allow children with cleats to drop grass clumps willy nilly all over their homes. So I guess it's just SAHM for me, that is if stay-at-home means always in the car.(preschool, lacrosse, football, lacrosse, cross-country, lacrosse, karate, more lacrosse, treblemakers-what we called glee club) But if the question is how do I make money, then the answer is poker. Not paycheck type money, but full to bursting shoe closet type money. It's not so much that I'm a great player(I can run the numbers and read faces passably well,) but it's more that men are dumb. Break out the cleavage and they have no idea if you're smiling or wincing.

BM told the courts we (meaning I) don't allow her to talk to her children ... so after that we granted free access to a phone to call mom don't care what time it is ... she pays for their cell phones ... she bought one for SD for christmas. So here we have a cycle of phones ringing if mom wants to talk to her children ... house phone, 3 kids cell phones, and hubby's cell phone ... she calls them in a circle until someone answers one time.... I was sick as a dog and the last thing on my mind was taking a phone with me into the bathroom .... she called the house, hubby's cell, and 2 kids phones consecutively for almost a half hour hubby was outside with the 2 of the kids doing stuff in the yard.. i yelled for them to answer the phone mom's calling ... no one heard a phone ringing ... finally it stopped .... 15 minutes later the ringing started again ... at this point i picked up the phone and said unless ss14 is on fire stop calling here! She said he's not on fire but I want to talk to my babies!!!! I hung up the phone. The police showed up, had to explain to the officer that I was spewing liquid out of every orafice of my body and that hubby and the children were not in the home to answer her calls ... showed him how many times she had called EACH phone. She called again while he was here this time the house phone. He answered the phone and told her everything was fine and the children were fine did she need anything else ... she needed to talk to her children he told her your children are outside playing they will call you when they come in. SS14 broke his cell phone on purpose .... 2 months ago .... he doesn't want another one ... what 14 yr old wouldn't want a cell phone he has had it since he was 11 mind you ..... he can't stand how his mom bugs him all the time calling him constantly so he told her he doesn't want a new phone ... i gave him an old one of mine which he really likes he refuses to bring it to mom's to have it turned on .... this way she can't bug him .... So LH until SS gets tired of the phone calls you just have to deal.... he needs to tell her i'll call you and your hubby needs to set her straight ... no clue how my hubby never could .... I totally agree it interupts his time with the kids and undermines anything you are doing with them and its a distraction ... but see your hubby is not the one getting the phone calls .... When SD was seeing a counselor who told me she can't really talk to her mom that much on the phone .... told her ok I will leave a message on your phone everytime she calls mom and another when she gets off the phone .... did it for a week .... the counselor told mom there has to be a better way to deal with this than being on the phone constantly. So thinking your hubby needs a call everytime mom's calls just to interupt his day .... When the house phone rings now ... unless one of the kids answers it it goes to voicemail.... I do not even look at hubby's phone to see who is calling.... kids phone are on vibrate while here and if they are talking to mom they have to go in their rooms. SD isn't allowed to bring her cell phone to school ... so mom drops it off here when SD is here so SD can have it if she needs it. she's 11. I see it as a control issue ... mom gets to control the kids and dad's relationship even when they are here.

It sounds like she's not taking responsibility. I was having trouble sleeping the other night and I slept on the couch in my room so I didn't bother DH...I suppose I could have gone to DD's room and slept on her trundle, or the guest room, or the couch in the living room but for some reason it didn't occur to me. Anyway, I woke up with a sore back because the couch in our room is not that comfortable for sleeping. I still woke up in time for work. Also, often DD will go to sleep with me, and wake up on our couch in our room. When she asks what happened I tell her the bed is not big enough for two or three (depending if DH is there!) and I needed my sleep. Like most kids...She sleeps like a windmill in high winds. The bed is an excuse. I guess my question would be; does SS want his own bed there, is he uncomfortable, is he getting flak for ruining her sleep.... etc. If any of those are true, then not having separate sleeping arrangements is to his detriment and worth bringing up in court. If not.... I don't think it's the hill I would die on. JMO. (as an aside) It sounds like this woman is a train wreck. I can't imagine having to send a little person to be (un)cared for and know that s/he would be coming back to me dirty/hungry/scared/unhappy. It hurts my heart. I used to do financial administration for a private preschool. The tuition was over 8k a year. The teachers would show me the lunches sent by some of the mothers. Hardly any food in some of them, kids showing up who hadn't been bathed, in dirty clothes... And these parents HAD the finances to care for their children. Pure neglect. I still think about some of those little ones.

lol, I picked her up from school yesterday and we went back to her class to get her backpack & binder. I asked, 'you have everything?' and she said yes. Later, after 5pm she tells me she forgot her spelling words in her desk. Well, Wednesday is the night they have to put spelling words in alphabetical order and write them three times each. She knew this but I wasn't thinking about it, we had been at the doctor's office & radiology all afternoon, but she brought it up. She said she guesses she can't do her spelling since school is out. My first thought was she did it on purpose and I wanted to call her on it. I didn't. I thought about it for a while and a couple miles down the road, I said that when we get home, she can call her friend that's in her class and ask for the spelling words. She claimed she didn't know her phone number but I told her I do. When we got home, I double checked her binder and the usual spelling list wasn't there but the spelling words were. I found a loophole... the teacher sends home an optional sheet on Fridays. It's an activity they can do over the weekend and at the bottom, it gives the next weeks spelling words so they can start practicing if they want. Well, of course she was bummed that I found that and proceeded to write them out three times each but not in ABC order. DH had her redo it in ABC order. Then we watched TV for a while. She had a great attitude. Her mom sent DH a text message an hour after she went to bed to have SD call her. He wrote back that she was in bed and if she wants, she can call in the morning before SD leaves for the bus. She called before any of us were up and wanted to talk to SD so I went and got her up. I heard SD telling her about going to the doctor and say her arm doesn't hurt anymore. She started to ask BM how she was doing and then abruptly says ok, I love you too. Bye. BM apparently didn't want to 'chat'. That is the FIRST time BM has called SD in a very long time, I can't remember the last time she called her. The doctor called me a few minutes ago to say the X ray shows no break. He said she probably pulled a muscle if she fell on her hands playing on the trampoline. There's not much to do for it, he said to apply heat and showed us how to stretch the muscle. It will resolve itself in a few days if she rests it. and I do agree that some lying... about school work or brushing teeth, etc. are common at her age. I don't know if it's normal or alarming, and I understand the lies she tells her mom to get mom's attention, but she is old enough to understand that there are consequences for those kinds of lies when mom gets CPS or the police involved. There could be great consequences for DH and me. I was more concerned with her lying about injuries, being hit, and things she complains to her mom about but doesn't tell us. We don't find out until BM calls DH to chew him out or now, until she calls CPS. SD never complained to us about having to eat foods she doesn't like and when she told DH about her arm, she only mentioned it once and he didn't see a reason to go to the doctor and she never complained to us about it again. And we don't know if SD complained to her mom or if her mom is the one that is asking her if she was seen by the doctor but I don't know why BM would put it on her daughter to get dad to take her to the doctor if SD isn't saying it hurts. I'm probably overly cynical of BM, but I'd say she knows SD fell on the trampoline and got hurt and didn't want to pay for a doctor visit so she told SD to tell dad her arm hurts so he can make sure it wasn't hurt too bad. SD told him a couple of days after coming back from BM's, after she got off the phone with her. BM might have reminded her to ask dad. DH looked at it, and didn't think it was broken and considering SD had gone to cross country and was swinging her arms around earlier, concluded it wasn't too serious. SD never told him she fell down on the trampoline. I'm sure she didn't want to get mom in trouble, although we don't know exactly what happened so it could be an innocent **stuff happens with kids** accident or it could be she was not being supervised and got hurt. We don't know that and we already know BM isn't going to tell us if she did anything wrong. But, when SD came home this last weekend, she did tell DH that she collided with her sister on the trampoline and cut her lip. She said her teeth went into her sister's leg. That was on Sunday and on Monday, she didn't call BM but she did call BM on Tuesday and after she got off the phone, she again told DH that her arm hurt. On Wednesday is when CPS went to the school so it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see how coincidental it all is. I'll admit that I am pessimistic when it comes to BM. But, I've never been wrong about her actions.. not yet anyways. I have been surprised that she has done some things I've predicted because I honestly was fooled at first and she presented herself as a GREAT mother. But, maybe because of my 'control freak'ness, I noticed little details that went unnoticed by my DH about her. I mean, she did things that I found odd being a mother myself. I went through custody issues with my son's father and we would fight over who gets him more, not who has to take him. She was always asking him to take SD on her weekends but if he ever offered to let her make up the time, she said she was busy. She never asked to makeup the time either. Then, when she refused to help her daughter do a school project, that pretty much sealed my opinion of her... she actually told my husband that if I want to do 'mom' things (like bake cookies, which I guess really upset her) that I can help her with her school project too. Hearing her say that shattered my image of her being a wonderful mom because I can't imagine saying or doing that to my own child. It's been downhill since then and she has aspired to new lows as a mother, in my opinion. The only one I did not see coming was her moving away and giving us custody, that blindsided me because we had just spent several months (and thousands in lawyers) to fight for custody and she fought it so fiercely, I never imagined anything would cause her to give up her daughter so easily. Maybe that is why SD was so affected too, she saw how fiercely her mom fought to keep her, only to be discarded two weeks later for a stranger. (so, yes I have had a hard time not resenting and hating BM for doing that and I need to learn how to let that go, but it's hard)