We found out a couple of days ago a childhood friend of my daughter was in a terrible accident a little over a week ago. They think she got distracted from the road when she was trying to look through her purse for her phone. She was going at least the speed limit or faster and hit a tree. The impact was so hard that the car engine came up through the dashboard and pinned her in. The bottom half of her body was crushed. They've been trying to save her legs, but it's not looking so good. She's a mother with 2 kids, and only 32 years old. To add to the problem them have no health insurance. Thank goodness she didn't hit another car, but her life and the lives of her family have changed forever. I agree that phones and texting in a car should be illegal.

Wow! First class all the way! First-class design work. First-class exhibit. First-class young lady! Bravo! Thanks for sharing! There is nothing quite like the feeling you get when your work is featured in a gallery. Jodi-

Thanks Oh My! So far my approach has just been to read aloud a lot with A__. We take turns reading paragraphs (I read one paragraph, he reads two) so that he can hear my pronunciation and I can help him with his. If I choose the books, I choose ones that he will like, but that have lots of tough words (like Dinotopia - A__ loves it, but it's got a lot of big words that he doesn't know and are hard to pronounce). That way, I can compliment when he tackles a phonetically tough word successfully, without making him feel dumb because they're "easy" words. I can also stop him on some mispronunciations (but not all) to say "try that one again: 'armoried'" and we practice it a few times and move on. It's also shown me that he doesn't just not know how to make the correct sound, but that he doesn't always hear the difference between the sounds he has trouble with. For example, a character in Dinotopia is Henriette (an enormous chicken creature) and he pronounced her name as "Enwiekke." I said "Try that one again, her name is 'Henriette.' I bet you've never heard that name before, hey?" He repeated Enwiekke, I repeated Henriette, he said "Yeah, that's what I said." This has happened quite a few times, with pretty much all of the sounds he struggles with. I don't think it's impatience and wanting to move on in the book, because he seems to genuinely WANT to say it correctly, I'm pretty sure he doesn't hear the difference. A__'s reading comprehension and vocabulary are way above grade level, and he has no qualms about piping up with "What does this word mean and how do you say it? J-o-v-i-al?" So I'm pretty sure he's not unenthused about learning. Since he reads quickly and well, FDH and I don't worry that we're interrupting his flow of reading by stopping for his phonetically tough words. I remember the kind of stuff my mom did with me to help me with my childhood lisp... And it included pretending to be a snake, while making a sssssss sound, then saying "hissssssssssssssnake!" or dancing around like a goof saying "sssssssssssssilly!". Once I got better at that, I got practice sentences like "Silly Sam serves supper once the guests sit down". I guess am hesitant to do that sort of thing with A__, both because I don't want to make him feel like a baby (I'm not sure how to tranfser what mom did with me at age 6, to appropriate for A__ at age 9) and because I don't want to overstep and piss off BM when we've made so much progress lately! Haha, it's funny how things change from me b!tching about a soccer form, to discussing speech therapy techniques in 20 posts.

I do think, FD, that he is still afraid of her wrath and what happens when she is angered. If he had said no to getting her a car---for whatever reason---she would have been mad and DH hates a confrontation. But see--that is an issue, too. He won't fight with HER but he has no prob. causing issues with ME. Why? Because he knows---at the end of the day---I will *shut up and put up.* These issues, one by one, aren't worth wrecking our marriage over, BUT when they all add up, it becomes a larger problem. That's what we really need to address in counseling. As far as him thinking he was doing me a favor--see, that bugs me too. I had ALREADY discussed the issue with him and said that I would be "on call" to get SS (if BM couldn't, due to lack of car) on Mondays and DH would need to take Tuesdays and every other Friday. I told him I 100% was NOT going to cover for her any more than that, and if HE wanted to be her "call-a-ride" HE could. But that I was not going to do it. He said FINE, I understand, don't blame you, I will not ask you to cover for her, etc. And then a week later tells me he got her the car to take the pressure off me so I would not have to be on call for picking up SS? BUT--I had already made my stance clear and thought he agreed---so it was like, at the back of his head, he was already *expecting* me to be on call for BM, DESPITE what he had said. Does that make sense? I often feel like he just tells me what I want to hear. It's really frustrating b/c I can never...well...trust him. As far as the "smokes"...ughh...she is just so...I don't know. Really, I look at her and the way she looks, talks, acts, lives, and think WHAT was my DH thinking??? She is so awful with boundaries, and DH plays right into it. Thank goodness he didn't get her any---he would not do that, he hates cigarettes, but I thought it was so ballsy/strange that she would even ask him! HA. DH told me when he dropped the van off at her house the other day, it was almost on empty (LOL) and BM turned to her DH and said "I need some gas money" and he started telling her all he had was $15 to last until next week, and she said "too bad, I need it for gas!" I'm sure that will be the next thing--the gas $$ problem--although she did make it all through last school year without a problem. But that was before they had ANOTHER baby. So we'll see. I feel sorry for HER hubby's parents and their frozen savings account.