I really think why it worked for Dotz, above, is that her SS realized through his own divorce, how BM (his ex-) can so easily contaminate the well. It doesn't take much. Even a deep sigh from BM whenever dad's name or SM's name is mentioned, sends the signals to the kids that dad and SM make mom unhappy and threatened, so the kids feel threatened. Even as adults, very few SKs can remove the emotion from such and see it for what it is--mom being mom and her reaction is just that, her reaction and not necessarily the reality. But, when SS lost his own BM and the divorce shoe was now on his foot, it made it, I'd imagine, easier for things to click. I'm happy for Dotz. I've heard this from a few SMs, where after 20 or such years of being somewhat the family punching bag, something clicked, and next thing you know, BM was off somewhere with her new man and adult kids were all okie-dokie with dad AND SM. Some people have the ability to just let it all go and get back in love with whomever. I'm not sure I would. Actually, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't. It'd be very hard to let go of 20 years' memories of being the family scapegoat. And that is why I feel the real lesson here is for SKs or adult SKs. If it takes too long to put 2 and 2 together re: who on purpose, accidentally, or accidentally on purpose contaminated the well, it may be too late. Then, you lose one of your parents and/ or get divorced, and you have no one to reach out to. Given DNA, bio-dad may be forgiving, but SM may not, and she does not have the DNA connection that is usually required for that much forgiveness. Dotz' SS got really, really lucky. I hope he realizes that!

--"By the way, right or wrong, I went into my son's fb today and deleted her as his "mother"... left her as a friend though."-- In my opinion, you should not have messed with DS's FB. One, SM my think he did it and take out anger on him. Two, his page and if he allowed it to say 'Mother' I gotta believe he either wanted it to or felt it was best to at least not fight it to keep peace. I think you should have perhaps discussed it with him before removing it. You're his MOTHER, the lady there 24/7 with open arms and unconditional love...he knows who his mother is. THe obit might depend on the paper's guidelines. Here, usually the funeral home takes care of submitting the obit to papers after the family meets with funeral director to make arrangements. I have seen some obits state different things from paper to paper also. I've also seen where the family members on the 'in memory of' card states additional people sometimes not mentioned in the paper obit as 'family'. So as to the 'why' she left your son off, I have no clue. Did she actually write up the summary for obit or did perhaps one of her relatives? I'll agree it appears pretty uncaring to not give presents to one child but hand out to others. Do they at least make over him a bit on his birthday? The room is debatable. If they don't have room for a seperate bedroom and/or can not afford a bigger place, I'd have to say they do there the best they can. How old is the other son, does he live there fulltime and how often does your son go for visitations? I think all of that might form a better basis for opinions. Even if your son is there little or a weekend or two a month, I think they should try jard to at least give him his own space for his possessions he has at there house. I'd think he should also have a space for a bit of privacy even if it were something like the den (familyroom, finshed basement room?) so he has a place in home to get away without being bothered during the time he is present. I'll ask as you did not say...do these things bother your son? Does he mention hard feeling over some of the things you list? I'm just curious if some of this is an issue actually for him or if it bothers just you because you know how the situation is.

never had a step-grandmother, but I called my mother-in-law by her name, & she called me by mine. We were grown-up people, we had known each other before I met her son, & we both knew she wasn't my mother, although I think she sort of loved me (she & her son, my then-spouse, were too close for her to be entirely happy with any woman in his life). & when I was growing up, once I reached some age, I forget what age it was, I called my aunts by their names, without the "aunt". They always treated me like a human being with a brain (back in the day, adults often talked down to kids), & I had wonderful relationships with them. If kids are old enough to be aware of different relationships, they may be more comfortable calling step-grandmother "Doris". or they can call her "Sylvia". Tell 'em I said so LOL!

Nancy, I used to wonder aloud, even here on this forum, how it was that 10 of our 14.4 acres are heavily wooded and yet we rarely saw a squirrel. It wasn't that I was complaining, but it just seemed odd. I suppose the dogs we had in our early years scared them away. Well, the old dogs don't scare them and this year we have tons of them. I agree they are just rodents with bushy tails. I have been ignoring them in the yard, but if they start getting in the garden, they are going to be in trouble. Long, long ago we raised a baby squirrel using kitten milk replacer and the tiny bottle that comes with it. We never knew what happened to its mother, but had had a vicious thunderstorm and this baby probably fell out of a squirrel nest and she didn't come find it. It was so small that Chris, who was probably 13 or 14 at the time, walked around wearing a pocket t-shirt with the squirrel riding in the pocket. It spent the rest of its time in a hamster cage or being bottle fed. Later on it transitioned to a nut/fruit/seed blend meant for birds. Finally, when it seemed large enough to release, he'd put the squirrel outdoors in the morning for ever-lengthening periods of time (just like hardening off plants, lol), but whenever he went outside to check on it, it would run to him and come back indoors. One day, it didn't come back and we knew it had successfully gone back into the wild. That was a relief. I didn't want to have a pet squirrel in a cage in the house forever. Nowadays, I don't know if anyone in this family would want to get up at night to bottle feed a tree rat. Y'all do seem heavily overpopulated by squirrels this year. If the nut-bearing native trees up there produced as heavily last fall as they did down here, that's the reason why. We had so many acorns from the oak trees that walking in the yard was like trying to walk on marbles or golf balls, depending on the oak variety. We swept and raked up and composted acorns by the thousands all autuman and winter, and those were just from the yard, not the entire woodland. If the hickories, walnuts and pecans produced as heavily in the woodland as the oaks did, I'm surprised we don't have 1 billion squirrels. I'm afraid your battle with the voles and moles (and do you have gophers too?) will be constant, but I'm glad you're seeing fewer of them. I haven't found much vole damage in the garden yet, but they've been in there. Every now and then Pumpkin catches one and brings it out of the garden to play cat-and-mouse with it in the yard (endlessly) and I rarely see a dead vole, so I'm worried he is doing catch-and-release when we gets tired of playing with it. The good thing is that vole populations cycle up and down in roughly 2 to 5 year cycles, so some years will be better, though other years may be worse. Kaida sounds absolutely so precious and it touches my heart so much that she clearly adores you and trusts you and will sit and open her heart up to you and share all her thoughts, dreams, feelings and more. Someones when somebody remarries later on in life, the family is not so accepting of/loving towards the new spouse, but clearly they all have embraced you as their own and that is special too. Kaida herself sounds like she is such a precious gift and I know you surely treasure her in your life. I'm glad you're a sucker for kids. I know you will not regret one moment spent with her this summer and, hey, now you've got two more hands available for weeding! You certainly inherited a fine bunch of folks in the younger generations when you married Garry, so surely your life overflows with many blessings. I know it doesn't make you miss your son and his family back in MN any less, but it is nice to have the new kids, grandkids and great-grandkids geographically closer to you, isn't it? Millie, I didn't know that. What a horrible thing to use around edible plants! I do know that many, many products that once sold and widely used have been banned. When I was a kid, they sprayed DDT as the solution to everything. I always hated that stuff, but we were stupid kids, and when the big tanker truck was driving up and down all our local streets spraying for mosquitoes in the 1960s, we idiot children road our bicycles behind in the mist coming from that truck. It is a wonder we aren't all dead. My dad never used many chemicals, and as he got older, he progressively used them less and less until he was almost to the point of being organic by the time Alzheimer's Disease stole his mind and he gave up gardening because he no longer remembered how to do it. The few chemicals he used, he kept in a chest in the garage and we knew we were not even allowed to open the door to that thing. Our government does a lot of crazy things, and I just try to ignore it and them as much as possible. The tobacco thing is perplexing, but it is what it is--a sign of how dysfunctional our federal govenment has become, not that our state government is any better either. Hazel, If I had to choose between garden time and internet time, the garden would win every time. Since I'm home all day, I usually have time for both. Peppers are prone to sunscald in our climate. The plants can produce more fruit than their foliage can cover. When I see that happening, I try to remember to give them some extra nitrogen and extra water to push more foliar growth. When you first notice sunscalded peppers, if you bring them inside, you can cut out the bad part and use the rest of the pepper. If you don't notice the sunscald until later on, often the fruit will begin rotting inside from the damage. I harvested a laundry basket full of peppers last week and threw away maybe 3 bell peppers that had sunscald so badly that they were unusable, but was able to salvage and use most of several others that were only mildly sunscalded. I'm sorry to hear about the SVBs. It seems to be happening a lot in your part of the state over the last week or two. I keep thinking every morning as I walk down to the garden that today will be the day that I lose my first squash plant to an SVB, but it hasn't happened yet. It will happen any time though. There's some squash bugs and I'm trying to control them, but it is an annoying and time-consuming task. Hand-picking squash bugs and drowning them is effective, but while I'm doing it, there's a little voice inside my head screaming "ain't nobody got time for that". lol. It is true, but I take the time and do it anyway. Right now the temperatures are cool enough that I don't mind spending some morning time on squash bug destruction, but the deeper we get into summer and the hotter the weather gets, I know I will mind doing it and at some point I'll just stop doing it. We just do not have enough good natural pests of squash bugs, leaf-footed bugs, blister beetles or stink bugs, so keeping a garden free of them is virtually impossible. Well, maybe people who use chemical pesticides can do it, but that's not me and I won't go that route. In my newly open spaces, I'm planting fall tomatoes and more southern peas. Always, always southern peas because we like them and because they tolerate heat so well. I've already got too much okra, winter squash, watermelons and melons, so southern peas it will be. Is there anything you want more of but haven't planted yet? If so, that's what I would plant in your newly available garden beds. You could go ahead and plant green beans now for a fall harvest. It is a touch early for them down here, but I've had good luck some years from a late June planting of them. At the worst, they'll start blooming in hot weather and not produce much until the weather cools in late August or early September, but if we get periodic cool and rainy spells, sometimes they will produce all summer long. I hope rain finds y'all soon. It is ridiculous how long your part of the state has gone now without meaningful rainfall. Here's the map that illustrates it pretty well: Consecutive Days Without 0.25" of Rain It is shocking that the month of the year that generally is the rainiest has brought central OK somewhere between nothing and next-to-nothing in terms of inches of rainfall. The end of May wasn't much better, was it? We slipped into Moderate Drought 2 weeks ago, then two good rainfalls brought part of our county back out of it and back to Abnormally Dry last week. Oops. I never did the Drought Monitor post last week, so here's the latest Oklahoma Drought Monitor map: OK Drought Monitor And, for forum members who live outside of OK, here's the US Drought Monitor Map: U S Drought Monitor Map Honestly, as a gardener, by the time that the powers-that-be show us as being Abnormally Dry, we already are so dry that I almost cannot water enough to make a difference so to some extent, it doesn't matter to me what stage we're in each week, because they're all bad and all challenging to the garden plants. However, once we hit Severe Drought I stop watering everything but the perennials because I can't water enough to push production out of annual veggie plants once we are that dry. Even in Moderate Drought, sometimes it feels like the watering is only keeping plants alive, but not really keeping them in production. The good news is that summer is actually here now, and it doesn't last forever, so we can start hoping for an early autumn cooldown and the return of more plentiful moisture. Keeping plants happy in July and early August in OK surely is incredibly challenging even in just a normal run-of-the-mill year, much less in a drought year. Dawn