After a few weeks in our house, Evan was ready to start making changes. His first project was the construction of a chain link fence around our backyard. He didn’t care for the open look where you couldn’t tell where your property ended and someone else’s yard started.

He bought the chain link fencing and started to work. This didn’t set well with the kids next door, who had apparently considered the whole side of the mountain as their playground. They started pelting him with rocks, until their father saw them and made them come over and apologize.

We discovered we had an alarm system, which didn’t call anyone, but made enough noise to wake the dead. I found this out when I saw a panic button in the closet and decided to see what that was all about. We panicked all right, until we figured out how to turn it off. Then, we discovered the alarm was on all of our doors and windows as well.

After Don and Kimberly met at the New Year’s Eve party, she became a regular at our house. They were together every chance they got. Kimberly was a live wire. She was bubbly and extraverted and up for most anything. She and Christi clashed from the beginning. Christi resented her spending so much time with her twin, and Kimberly resented Christi as well.

Kimberly was an RN, and she got off her shift late at night. She started coming over after we were in bed. Evan heard a noise in the night and went downstairs to investigate. He found Don’s door locked. It took a while for Don to open it, while he allowed Kimberly to escape through his window, from which he’d deactivated the alarm. Evan’s outrage put a temporary halt to the nightly visits.

Connie was at the age she was starting to give us those typical problems young teens sometimes exhibit. The move from New Orleans and her being allowed to live with Christi and her roommate until we could get more settled had resulted in Connie having too much unsupervised freedom.

We were blissfully unaware she’d been skipping out of school and rushing to the post office in time to intercept the letters being sent to us from her teachers. She was even changing her grades on reports, so it was a big shock when we found out. She wasn’t at all happy when we started demanding more of her. We now had mail coming to our house and a phone where we could communicate with her teachers. We realized she was in over her head with some of her schoolwork.

I’d gotten a job putting a catalog together for a shooting supply company, so it was Evan’s responsibility to take Connie to school and back each day. Evan had been busy working up until now and hadn’t had that much input into child rearing. He was having to feel his way into his new role and control his temper and try not to get too upset with her. He was pleased if he could even get her to talk to him.

It seemed as our three older children matured, we had a lot of new problems to deal with that we hadn’t had in the past.

With Connie being ten years behind the others in age and not having grown up with a sibling she could easily relate to, it was like starting over with parenting. She didn’t take well to being disciplined. She declared she hated us and couldn’t wait to leave home. The older children had reacted with tears, but had never been so openly expressive as Connie. Yet, we understood she was frustrated and saying things she didn’t really mean.