This Week On 'All My Children'

Things with us are actually in a relatively peaceful state, right at the moment. 1F is through with all the court haggling - her baby's adoption is final, and her relationship with the adoptive parents is working out pretty well. She's working, and this fall she's back in school, studying speech pathology. So her life is in as good a place as it's been in a long, long time. It’s a little hard being a 24-year-old college freshman – all her age-peers have long since graduated and gotten on with their lives – but that’s a pretty minor complaint, compared to where she’s been.

2F is still doing well – she’s one or two classes away from getting her initial ‘professional’ certification, which will allow her to make more of a real living for herself. She moved out of our basement ‘apartment’, and in with some single women from our Christian community. When she completes her certification, she’s giving serious thought to doing a year of voluntary missionary work.

Even with 3M, things aren't as bad as they've been. He's starting to see the fruit of the crap he's been throwing around for the last several years, and starting to think that he needs to take a different approach. He actually told Molly recently that he wants to start turning his life around. Of course, we're all in favor of that, and we want to encourage him to do that. But he's spent years forming bad habits that he's going to need to break if he really wants to turn his life around. It won't be easy, and we told him that. But at least the need is recognized, and the desire is there.

In other ways, he’s sort of floundering right at the moment. He can't seem to find a job, but he bought himself a beater van. But he's got no money to put gas in it, so he leaves it parked on the street in front of our house. . . . At any rate, he's only got a month or so to go before his life starts running according to somebody else's script for a while.

4M is back in school for his sophomore year in high school. His date with the magistrate in August went as well as it possibly could have – all the charges against him were dropped, since he’s got no prior record, he’s a good student, and an otherwise upstanding citizen. He’s got ‘points’ against him just sitting there, waiting for him to get a driver’s license, but he’s in no hurry for that right now (and neither are we, given what his insurance rates would likely be). He seems to have been chastened by the whole experience. That would be a good thing. We keep getting flashes of hot-headed defiance from him that we’d rather do without, but some (most?) of that falls under the heading of ‘teenaged male’.

The younger kids are pretty much status quo, at least per this previous post. Growing in wisdom and stature, and all that. But we’ll see what adventures they’ve got stored up for us, when the time comes. . .

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