Okay, so I left you with us in a pop-up camper and through traveling. Now, don't get me wrong...our camper was nice. We had indoor plumbing, complete with a shower, plenty of room for all of us to sleep (even when we had our niece), a refrigerator/freezer, a nice heater, a great air conditioner (which was nice in the 100+ degrees that summer in Utah), a place to cook, and room to put everything that wasn't in storage. We even had a TV with a VCR (this was pre-DVD). We had a nice set-up for the traveling summer...we were ill-prepared to spend the fall and upcoming winter in the Texas Panhandle. We had been through a Halloween in six inches of snow, and we knew how cold it could get and how quickly it could get that way. My mom used to call it a "Blue Norther," and it could turn you "blue" in a hurry. We did have a great heater, but we had a tent on either end of this camper. I didn't think that the heater could keep up with temperatures dipping below freezing and staying there.

We also had the problem that all of our things were in storage...this was supposed to be a short-term arrangement. All of our winter clothes, coats, hats, boots, just about anything we would need for the slightest change of season were in boxes, and the boxes were stacked twelve feet high in the storage unit. Planning ahead was going to be a major problem.

The most pressing emotional moment would come with the beginning of the school year. We had planned on seeing the town in our rear-view mirror in August, and that didn't happen. We would have to deal with the school system for at least a few more months, and that was not an attractive prospect. We had been through the loop with these small-town, closed-minded people as long as we cared to. We felt defeated. We had been through the legal system, and we didn't feel like anything else that we did would make a difference. We had been able to obtain some excellent support through a non-profit advocacy group, and my parents had been our lifeline through the whole ordeal. Their support was unwavering, and I will forever be grateful to them for that. They loved us and our children through that time, and my children have wonderful memories of their grandparents (they have both since passed away). As painful and difficult as those times were for us, I feel like God put us there, knowing that the experience would enrich our lives (isn't that strange?) and to enrich the lives of our children, who would not feel the strain of the experience too much.

Our oldest daughter does remember some about the experience, though the things that she remembers are the social workers trying to talk her into saying something guilt-inducing about her parents or her grandparents. I remember them taking her aside without our knowledge and interrogating her. I believe now that adults can coerce children into saying something if their efforts are intense enough and last for a long enough period of time. I have seen that process, and it is one of my great regrets in life that my daughter had to go through it. I know that there are children out there who need help, and I would be the first one to protect a child. I saw children when I was teaching, and I made reports more than once. I, however, never made a fraudulent report with a spirit of malice, and for that, I am proud. I always had the best interests of the children at heart. I hate that my oldest daughter had to go through that process, to hear suggestions about which she had no clue, and the years, really, that we spent trying to heal the things that she endured during that time. I think, in a way, that her life was "colored" by that experience. It certainly soured us as parents, and it made all of our dealings with public school officials suspect from that point forward. We always went into ARD meetings after that with a certain sense of suspicion and certainly with an attitude of reservation.

It has been a stressful thing for fifteen years now, and we are about to come to the end of our relationship with the public school system. That is jumping way forward in the story, and we will get there eventually.