Blended Family

Pippa

Elliott was at his father's for the weekend, which was fine with me.  Our regular custody agreement was weekends and every other Wednesday with his father.  Otherwise, he was with me.  However, now that he was a teenager, we were more relaxed.  We followed the arrangement generally, but if Elliott wanted to be somewhere else, that was fine.

This little spat between Elliott and Josephine had obviously gone too far.  They were at the center of it.  The teenagers seemed to have a person vendetta against each other.  They'd known each other for several years now and had never liked each other.

I was up early again with Jack the next morning.  He was really a good baby, but babies were still a lot of work.  Thank goodness he didn't have colic.  With everything that had been going on, I didn't feel like I'd ever had a chance to grieve over their parents' deaths.  My life was a constant go-go-go right now, and I wasn't sure when it would stop.

Luckily, Lin was being super helpful and supportive.  Josephine adored her father, and it was easy to see why.  When he was with Alex, she was the center of his attention.  He got down on the floor with her, even on his belly, and played with her.  Nothing was below him.  Alex was practically an extra appendage now.

"Again!" she laughed later that morning from the living room.  Lin laughed and threw her up in the air again, then gently body-slammed her onto the couch.  She laughed and laughed as he tickled her.

"Alright, why don't you try to go potty?" he requested.  "You haven't been all morning."

"No!" she said.  "Again!"

"After we try going to the potty," he told her, taking her little hand.  She followed him to the bathroom, where I now had a little step stool for her.  She wore Pull-Ups and was about 75% potty trained.  She needed to be reminded a lot of the time.

"Good girl!" I heard him praise Alex from the bathroom.  "Now wash your hands."

They came out a minute later and she ran to the candy drawer, which she wasn't tall enough to reach yet.  Lin told her to watch her fingers as he opened it.  He unwrapped a Hershey Kiss and handed it to her as a reward.  She shoved it in her mouth and asked for another.  Lin gently told her no and asked if she wanted to go color.  She did.

Lin and I seemed to be easing into a bit of a routine with the kids.  He'd come over mid-morning and it was divide and conquer.  Most of the time, Alex wanted Lin so I tended to Jack.  Since Joey was at her mother's for the week, Lin could easily lend more time to being at my place.

Elliott spent the night at his father's and came home Sunday afternoon.  His hand and wrist, about halfway up his forearm, was in a cast.  Luckily, it wasn't the hand he wrote with, but I could already tell he was depressed about missing out on the football season.  He spent most of his time in his room and moped around.  I'd also grounded him, so that didn't help his mood either.  Which was why I was surprised to find pictures of him at a party Saturday night posted on a friend's Twitter page.

I knocked on my son's door and when I entered, was met with the unmistakable stink of teenage boy.  I made a mental note to come back through with some Febreeze later.  He was laying on his bed doing homework.  I held up my phone, showing the picture of him.

"What's this?" I asked him.

"Looks like me having a good time," he commented smartly.

"When you were supposed to be grounded," I added.  "Why were you out?"

"Dad let me," he informed me.  Immediately, I was pissed.  Steven was terrible at enforcing things.  I was definitely the heavy when it came to discipline.  This wasn't the first time I'd grounded Elliott only to find out Steven let him do things.