Sunday, June 28, 2009

Raising Teenagers is like being Pecked to Death by Ducks with Poor Depth Perception


I had already decided that I was going to try my hardest to make today a good day. Derek and I are both pretty upset about the fact that our deadbeat renters now owe us $800 and neither one of them have a job and they don't really seem to care that we are about to kick them out. So we are now late on some of our payments and are going to have to do some creative budgeting to get through the next month or two. Plus the renters are chain smokers (they can't afford to pay their rent but they sure can go to the smoke shop) and have torn up the carpet. That means that when we finally get them out then we are going to have to repaint every room in the house and replace all of the carpet. I just get so tired of nothing seeming to go our way.

Anyway - I sat down at the computer this morning to check the SSRI forum that I belong to, see what is happening on Twitter, and read my emails. In hindsight, I shouldn't have looked at the e-mail that told me that I had a new phone bill from AT&T. After that viewing, I can guarantee you that I am not going to have a good day. For those of you that know me, you know that I have 5 children who now range in age from 16 down to twins who are turning 12 next month. I am beginning to think that it was actually a lot easier when they were all little and were running all over the place like rabid monkeys.

Rachel, my oldest, has a boyfriend that she has had for 7 months (I know that it has been 7 months because I hear about how long they have been together at least once a day). Rachel also used to have full cell phone privileges and was allowed to text (up to 250 texts per month) and call people on her cell phone. However, with her last boyfriend her ability to do math went right out of her brain and she sent over 4,000 texts (mostly to him) in one month. Therefore, we took the cell phone away for quite a while and she basically ended up grounded for a year until she worked off the $1,200 phone bill. Evidently - she didn't learn. With this new boyfriend, she has already been in trouble once for sending texts when she wasn't supposed to and talking on the phone with him for too long. We have told her that she is allowed to talk to him once a day for 10 minutes. I guess that her telling time function has also been lost because when I got the phone bill today, those were not ten minute calls.

She has been calling him during the day while Derek and I are at work and talking for at least 30 minutes each day. We have a long distance phone package that has a certain amount of long distance minutes on it and she has passed that by a long shot. The bill is $100 more than it normally is and right now is not a good time to have to pay an extra $100 on a bill. I called Derek at the fire station and informed him and he agreed with me that we have given her chance after chance after chance and she is obviously not getting the message. So now she won't be allowed to see him for a month and she will only be allowed to talk to him twice a week for ten minutes each, with us in the room. She is not going to be happy but I really don't give a damn.

That little duckling has pecked us one too many times.

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