They are still alive.  Sometimes it is best to keep your expectations low.

Actually J, the niece likes to clean my house.  That’s good but she has a tendency to rearrange things and then we don’t know where anything is.

Z, the stepkid…. Dear God.  Words fail me.  It is getting to the point that I really hope that we have a wrong diagnosis on her and that she actually has Asperger’s.  If she doesn’t than the only other option is that she’s a blooming idiot.  That sounds harsh but we’ve all just been staring at each other dumbfounded by some of the things she does.

After the first meltdown she didn’t really get better.  The next day I heard her telling J that she (Z) got to pick what they did because she lives here.  I pointed out that she doesn’t live here except for a few days a month usually.  I thought about going into the rules of hospitality to point out that she was going to lose this argument any way it went when she told me that she was the 3rd owner of this house.  I asked if she paid any bills.  She said no.  I told her she was squatter.  We had to have this discussion because she looks for any advantage that will make her be in charge and then she tries to lord it over everyone else.

Later that day she kicked J twice when asked to help clean something up.  We didn’t hear about that in a timely fashion so there was a big discussion later that night.

I missed the next big thing.  I was a work and came home to a shell-shocked husband and J.  Seems that Z was just standing in the kitchen when she urinated all over.  When asked why she replied that she just didn’t think to go to the bathroom.  This used to be a big problem when she was five.  She’s almost 9.  I thought this was behind us.

Since loss of house-breaking seems to be my department, they deferred to me.  I used urine test strips to check for a medical reason.  Nope, nothing.  She just peed all over the kitchen and doesn’t really seem to understand why everyone is so upset.

There’s been good stuff too.  We were able to go bowling and then to roller derby yesterday.  We went to a movie today and everything was fine.  But at the roller derby last night there was a program that had pictures of all the players and their nicknames.  One had Pixie in her name.  In her picture she had on wings.  Z was so excited that there was a real pixie on the team.  We pointed out that they were costume wings and she denied it.  We pointed out the actual person to show that she was human.  No go.  Then she got mad because her father said something about The Hulk.  She yelled at him because the Hulk isn’t real.  I pointed out that she believes in pixies.  She said of course she does because she wrote them a letter and they wrote back. Today she said that she wrote the pixies a letter last night but they were too busy shopping to answer.