I hate unpacking and I’m tired. Besides, Puppy is off doing something fun–it’s ok for me to take a break.

The trip was up and down and up and down and….
My first impulse is to say that I hate his father. It probably is an overstatement though. His father is going to be a problem for me probably for the rest of his life, though I bet we will eventually come to some sort of terms. I will never again be at that man’s beck and call night and day. Of that I am 100% certain. I am never setting foot in that RV again. I will be renting a car during all future visits. I will not stay at his house. My schedule will never be at his beck and call. He is a total jerk. Specifically: he is fond of telling people what is expected of them at the very last second and then getting really angry when they are not finished when he would like them to be. He also never gives anyone enough information and gets really frustrated when they don’t read his mind. He likes to yell and give orders when it isn’t appropriate. When things are going his way, and everyone is jumping fast enough, he can be ok though. I refuse to ever be at his mercy again. But he isn’t actually evil and I probably don’t actually hate him. I just don’t deal well with his style of interaction. He is incredibly self-centered and rude and…. I wanted to shoot him many times during the trip.

The step-mother is stupid. Literally. I think she has a low IQ. By the end of the trip I reached the conclusion that I will probably never care enough about her one way or another to have an opinion. She is annoying, but I tend to just ignore the annoyance factor from people who are that stupid.

The little brothers are awesome. The youngest one, who called me the sucky girlfriend early in the trip and made me cry, turned out to be really cool–he’s just an almost 12 year old boy and he says rude/stupid things sometimes. For the last two days whenever anyone said anything that wasn’t polite to me he would give them a dirty look and say, “Don’t say mean things to Princess! She doesn’t like it.” The boys were calling me Mother 4 (Bio-mom, step-mom, then long-time friend’s mother come before me) and when I told them to do things they would get up immediately to do it. They totally ignored their father. It was funny. We spent most of the last three days talking and getting to know one another and I like them both a lot. They are going to come visit us and I can’t wait. 🙂 I think staying for the RV portion of the trip was worth it just to get to know the brothers. I rescued the littlest one when he fell out of the raft during the white water rafting trip (ok, it would have been dealt with by someone else and he probably wouldn’t have gotten seriously hurt anyway) and he called me his hero. 🙂 The older one is heading into high school and we had some pretty adult conversations about interactions between people and ways to handle different situations (his father was yelling at him constantly) and I think I probably helped him get through the trip without some tears because he was on the verge several times.

And Puppy and I had some really awesome adventures. It was lots of fun with him. It was indeed a learning experience. Staying was the right call.