Nothing special....

Lydia, glad to see the mystery has been solved and the article returned to its proper place. I happen to totally agree with the sentiment and that doesn't make me un-American, if any of the Secret Police are out there monitoring our blog.
My daughter's father lives in Southern California. Land of beaches, Disneyland, and the latest "cool" fashions. I went through the same crap when she was young. Visits to Dad's were nothing but fun, fun, fun, (including her stepmother taking her to Wal-Mart and telling her it was okay to shoplift as long as my daughter got something for her (the stepmother) too), but that's an entirely different blog. Anyway, I got tired of hearing, "I want to live with Dad" everytime my daughter didn't get her way and so one day I said, "Okay, fine. You can live with Dad. But here's the deal - you have to stay for a full year, NO MATTER WHAT! You can't come back here until you've been there a year." Of course, she felt this was no problem, because she'd never want to move back in with wicked 'ole me anyway. Needless to say, living with Dad turned out to be a lot different than visiting him. After 4 weeks the begging to come home and promising to be a perfect child started. It was extremely (and I DO mean extremely) hard to keep telling her no, and to be honest I didn't hold out for the entire 12 months. After 8 months she came home for what was supposed to be just a Christmas visit, and I ended up letting her stay. God knows I had my share of problems with her even after that, but I never heard "I want to live with Dad" again!