Thanks Sweeby! I don't think I shared anything she didn't already know... well, not sure if she knew her mom doesn't pay dad but she knows her mom always says she has no money. She didn't even buy her a birthday gift this year. Apparently, the ONLY gift she got this year was what I bought her & my dad gave her $50 & took her out to dinner. But, she knows grandma is the one buying anything at BM's house. BM has taken her to the thrift store a couple of times to get clothes or gives her sister's hand me downs... which is another reason the clothing issue just irks me... the prized clothes aren't nice, expensive, new, etc. and here I take her to the Gap, Old Navy, etc. and buy nice quality stuff. (and I know it's not about that... she wants mom's stuff because mom got it for her & she wants mom's approval) SD has reached the conclusion with BM. When she left her PE clothes at BM's over a month ago, she kept it secret & BM kept promising her to call the school & get her new ones. Finally, she told DH she didn't have PE clothes, that she was using a loaner pair of shorts & had brought one of BM's BF's t-shirts (which I thought is odd) and had been using those. When he told me, I went to the school & paid for new PE clothes. After school, SD said thank you & told me she knew her mom was never going to buy them because she never does what she says. So, SD is aware of BM and can admit it, however she still wants to protect her most of the time, which makes it very hard to wonder if SD is "coming around" or just being manipulative. The hardest thing to deal with in regard to SD is the damaged trust. She has done so many things, told so many lies & manipulations, continues to be caught in lies on a daily basis... though most are small things average kids do, but it's the constant barrage of lies that makes us ask "does she EVER tell the truth?" As far as telling her the "truth" about things, right away she wants to call BM. Now, I don't know if she's calling to tell BM what we told her or if she's analyzing what we say versus what BM tells her so she can make her own conclusion about who's telling her the REAL truth. But, I do think it's a better way to handle it than to sit idle & let her think that everything her mom tells her is true. and to PO1~ earlier, you asked about favoritism with older sister? Yes, BM favors sister. So does grandma. When BM lived with DH & had SD, they split when SD was a year old. BM moved back to grandma but grandma let her bring older sister but not SD. DH kept SD for a few months until grandma relented & let her live there too. But it was only every other week because DH kept her one week, BM the next. When I met SD, she was 5 & would tell me how grandma is mean to her, doesn't like her, etc. Now, she may have been playing victim to get sympathy in the way she started telling everyone that will listen, how I am so mean to her, etc. Grandma may not have wanted to have BM put another baby in her lap so she could go out. I really don't understand the full dynamics of what occurred but I do know that as long as I've been involved, it seems SD has been shuffled to the side but sister is the golden child. Way back when SD started going to tae kwon do, it was only because she begged & DH agreed to pay half. BM & sister had been going for a while together & SD felt left out. So, yes I see lots of favoritism & SD seems to be unwanted. It sickens me to think this could be true, but I've wondered if it's because sister's father pays $1200 a month in support and BM knew she couldn't get that kind of money from DH. She often threatened him to get full custody & ask for huge support, but never tried. I don't think she wanted to take care of SD 100% of the time. Besides, he wanted 50/50 from the beginning so the most she got was $286 when they finally went to court and it wasn't worth it to her or she just didn't want to take SD with her when she moved away.

yes, we have done all of the above for getting the assingments done and it is like he has caught on to the fact that we wont allow him to just not get it done and we will sit there all night if we have to so instead he tells us he doesnt tell us about the assignement at all... Instead he will pick the easiest thing assigned and do that and say that is all he had to do... Then the next day comes around he lies to teacher... teacher calls us and we find out .. Oh he had a writing assignement to do as well... that he simply just chose not to do.. And we have been in regular communication with BM about this and she seems to be on the same page but not to the same extent... (For example when we picked him up Thursday after getting in trouble again at school he was outside playing... not really getting the point across) I was entirely for cancelling the atlanta field trip. Like I told DH would you rather lose some money now and hope he gets the lessen or continue this circle and end up with him dropping out in a couple of years because he has learned he can do what he wants and get away with it... But, he still decided to let him go and BM didnt want to lose any money either (which is kind of funny because in reality I really paid for almost the entire field trip they both chipped in some but it was moslty paid for by me... but anyways) But, I think the thing that is the most frustrating is the kid is totally aware of what he is doing... Wednesday night BM called DH to get onto ss because he was arguing with her about doing his math work and she was having a hard time with him... then Thursday after all of that drama we find out that he lied to us and then the teacher and had a writing assignement to do as well.. And yes, he has an iep and now he is on special standards and to be honest I think that is the worst thing that could have happen.. He is not dumb by any stretch of the imagination you just have to work harder to keep him on task ... so putting him on special standards to make things easier or give him less work I think is doing nothing but giving him a free pass at being lazy and his grades have done nothing but go down since then... being in special standards they should have gone up... one would think Now we are at the end of the year with only a month left to go... who knows if he is going to pass 4th grade... But, I am at a loss... I feel like his summer is going to be spent in redoing 4th grade with me because if he fails because of this nonsense I am going to be irate and not just with him but with DH and BM as well. And I have given him the benefit of the doubt and thought it was just to hard. I have sat with him for hours going over stuff and helping him and giving him tools to try and work things out... but (like with this writing assignment) it is stuff he has done a hundred times... he knows what he is doing he simply will not do the work. And, apparently this had become a problem in class now too... he just isnt doing not trying not anything except talking and playing and lieing about why he cant... UGHH !! I told him if he didnt straighten up I would be sitting in his classroom everyday to make sure that he stayed on task and when his friends wanted to know why I was there I would make sure that everyone knew I was sitting in there because c doesnt know how to listen behave and do his work...

These agency issues are one of the most researched and well understood things in business, especially in accounting, where the agency issue is constantly present. There is extensive research on small mom and pop businesses all the way up to multi-national corporations, and the research almost always points to the same conclusion. Despite the prevalent belief otherwise, business relationships are almost always customer driven. Businesses simply do things to make customers happy, even when it is less profitable. There is a sociological and psychological need to create conspiracies to explain less than satisfactory outcomes, which explains why so many people believe that every field has insiders and outsiders and the deck is stacked against outsiders. I am not saying this is what happened here, but sometimes I like to throw a fact or two out there, just because I believe in the power of knowledge. P.S. defamation in the form of either slander or libel is not a crime...

Yeah ... lots of critical things to consider such as initial and changing pH effects*, buffering, multivalent cations, anionic and cationic micronutrients, and zeolite like ion exchange surfaces on soil particles, which make it a play day for chemistry discussions. Then the attack and breakdown of plant and animal litter to slow release nutrients brings up neat microbiology and biochemistry aspects. Material science then decides to manipulate the situation with osmotic release and diffusion of encapsulated nutrients. And hydroponic principles try to partially play nature taking over the hydrology and lighting it up. Physics kicks ideas in there on this last aspect. For instance did you know that fluorescent light indeed glow when struck by energy (as you know), but much of the light intensity flashes through a series of distinct colors at 60 times a second? * Plants cheat neatly by manipulating ion exchange release of cationic nutrients. They knock off ammonium, potassium, magnesium, calcium and other positively charged ions by producing acid(s) to knock it off. H+ alone can cause the exchange but if the acid is on a small organic base (anion) like oxalate this organic can diffuse around and pull at the cations on soil that the plant wants and help knock it off, helping in the "weathering" breakdown of soil too. Chelators made by plants and microbes make it really interesting too. They diffuse around and hold certain critical nutrients so tightly that the plant has the choice of finding more, having a deficiency (specific nutrient starving), making a stronger chelator to take it back, and/or breaking the chelator down to free the nutrient. Now the fun parts ... the plant one might be considering is not be alone. A group of similar or different roots might be working together AND competing in that patch of soil, with different players at different depths Trees cheat and certain non woody plants cheat and go low. Moles, gophers and field mice run through this soil zone toox playing their games. No soil contact then no nutrient uptake, no root then no nutrient collection there for the plant, loss of stored nutrients and need to spend energy replacing the root. And there are smaller life forms co-inhabating the soil with the roots that are also directly or indirectly effected by soil pH. Let's put them into three classes as those that (1) don't generally effect a plant much, (2) can hurt the plant, or (3) can help the plant. Let's see ... hurting a plant is bad, unless it hurts a seriously competitive plant more. Helping a plant is good, unless it's again that serious competitor. Plants are not stand alone organisms in naturem. They live in community with microorganisms. So what if the soil pH helps support the growth of a microbe that can grow all over your plants roots? Sounds bad I know, but there are those three classes mentioned above. If your microbe is a pathogen that is bad. If it doesn't attack the plant but runs out and breaks down nearby leaf litter, great free food. It it doesn't hurt your plant but by being on root surfaces can compete with and stop pathogenic microbes from getting a foothold, great a free natural inoculation for immunity. There was a company called Eden Bioscience a couple decades ago here in the PNW that made an interesting observation. In large scale evergreen seedling production for forestry sometimes there were large scale fungal blights. Sadly alot of the seedlings all died at once in mass. However, sometimes there were a few seedlings near each other that did not succumb! In fact they looked totally healthy! When isolating bacteria, yeast and filamentous fungi from the surfaces of these plants they found that certain kinds could be grown in the lab that protected seedlings from attack, when sprayed onto them. These microbes grew best in their optimal pH range. They indeed colonized the plants, in this case leaf surfaces. And their presence did protect the leaves from pathogen attack. Obviously similar things must be happening in nature in the leaf canopy and also soil root zone of plants. So when a plant likes acidic pH 5 - 6 soil, is this just because nutrients are more available it? When I went to school, in what now seems like the dark ages, most plant physiology books focused almost solely on this. Or is it because beneficial microbes helping feed or protect the plant need that pH? My firm assumption is that both chemical and microbial pH dependent effects interact to make an optimum environment for that plant. And that some plants in the natural environment survive best, rather than grow best, at their optimal pH range. Why do many fungi sour (strongly acidify) what they are busy rotting? Niether competive microbes nor does the dieing plant tissue like it. The fungus gets more. This is exactly why you want to check the pH in the soil that you might be soon preparing for your new vegetable or herb garden this spring. Too basic, your plants starve. Too acidic, the pathogenic fungi don't starve. Then like the heirloom story of The Three Bears ... there's one pH that's just right.