ugh, this happened to me. i found photos of my daughter on flickr which some creep had taken. she posted them under her "family" album, as if my daughter were related to her. when i wrote to complain to yahoo, they said there was nothing they could do about it. wtf.

My daughter is at Growing Tree, in the infant room. It is not cheap ($1200 per month), but the caregivers there are absolutely wonderful. I looked at a couple places before I checked out GT2, and I was extremely impressed by the way the classroom is set up, the way the school is organized, and, especially, the way the teachers and the children interact. Most of the caregivers are mothers themselves and they love babies, really really love them. The head teacher for the infant room has been working with very young children for over 50 years. She is an amazingly energetic and loving woman who has published a few books on child development. The babies there get age-appropriate exercise every day, they have all sorts of activities going on through the month, and it's just a great place. Going back to work and putting my precious child in the hands of strangers was incredibly hard, but I feel better knowing that she is being cared for by a group of amazing, loving, competent women. Thumbs up.

was it all BS? maybe he did or said something to cause them to think that he needed a psychiatric evaluation. as someone who knows this guy, and knows how he tends to tell half-truths about incidents in order to make himself look better, i have to say that this all doesn't add up.

In contrast.... By MICHAEL WINERIP (NYTIMES) Published: June 24, 2007 LONG BRANCH, N.J. HOW to explain a teenager like Ed Kwiatkowski? Ed?s dad, a postal worker, died eight years ago. After that, Ed, his younger sister, Danielle, and their mother lived on the father?s Social Security check in a rundown trailer off Route 35 near here. Ed?s mother had a drug habit, went to jail for drug use at one point and died of a drug overdose last Dec. 2 at their trailer. School officials who arrived after the police answered the children?s 911 call were surprised at how bad conditions were in the trailer: no heat, a hole in the floor, frozen pipes, broken windows. No one from Long Branch High who knew 18-year-old Ed or his 16-year-old sister, Danielle, would have guessed. They are both top students. Ed ranked No. 7 in this year?s senior class. He won an award for perfect attendance. He was the No. 1 player on the tennis team until he quit to work two jobs after school to help support his family. Shortly after starting at Staples last fall, he was named employee of the month. On the Saturday morning his mother died last December, Ed was working the 3 a.m. to noon shift at the Dunkin? Donuts near the trailer park. Because of his mother?s drug use, Ed was afraid of what the police might do when they responded to the 911 call. While they investigated the trailer, Ed sent an e-mail message to his AP history teacher, Noah Lipman, from a neighbor?s trailer. ?We can?t even get into our house, ?cause *sigh* there was drugs present,? Ed wrote. Before becoming a teacher, Mr. Lipman had been a criminal lawyer for 25 years. ?I told Eddie flat out, ?Don?t make any statement to the police until we?ve talked,? ? said Mr. Lipman. As it turned out, the police were very understanding. ?The cops come into Dunkin? Donuts all the time,? said Ed. ?When they saw me they said, ?Hey, you?re the Dunkin? Donuts guy.? ? By nightfall, Ed and Danielle were back in the trailer, and on Monday morning, the Kwiatkowski orphans went to school. As Ed told Mr. Lipman, ?I?m going to keep doing the two things I do best, go to school and work.? How is it that some children falter, even with all the parental support in the world, and Ed and Danielle Kwiatkowski just keep going? While a few teachers like Mr. Lipman recognized how much more purposeful Ed and Danielle were than most teenagers, no one here truly understood it until the mother?s death. That morning, Terry Janeczek, the high school?s guidance director, made calls to see if the two needed help. ?Over the next six hours,? she said, ?as I pieced this together, my mouth dropped.? To this day, few here understand. ?Ed?s usually very shy,? says Mr. Lipman. ?He doesn?t talk much.? ?I never told anyone,? says Ed. ?I would suppose a few adults know the story of what happened,? says Danielle, who works after school at Domino?s Pizza. ?They know kind of we?re on our own but I?m not going to boast or anything,? says Ed. ?If I?m asked, I give an honest answer, like: ?Do you work a lot?? ?Yeah.? ? Ms. Janeczek and Mr. Lipman made sure the two had what they needed. Ms. Janeczek got them social services support and helped raise money to pay off creditors and do repairs on the trailer. Mr. Lipman had them to his home for Christmas Eve and Easter. He took them ziti and chicken dinners that his wife, Judy, cooked. He and his daughter Elizabeth, a high school senior, took Ed shopping for clothes. ?Eddie?s not very clothes-conscious,? says Mr. Lipman. ?He needed a little guidance.? They also helped arrange for Ed to become his sister?s guardian. Ed says it is no big deal parenting Danielle. ?Like, we know what to do,? he says. ?Eat stuff, clean up, do the dishes afterward, do our laundry.? Mainly, he says, he has to drive her because she doesn?t have her license, and he signs papers for her. ?She needs a permission slip, I sign it,? he says. The thing that has amazed the adults is how little help they really need. ?The foundations in the two children, the taking care of each other, were put in place before Mr. Lipman or I ever came around,? says Ms. Janeczek. As to how that came to be, even after asking them, it?s hard to know. Ed says: ?We didn?t have people to ask for help. Like homework ? we learned to look it up. We were not living in this good situation, so if we wanted to get out of that, we had to strive to do better.? Danielle calls it ?motivation to have a better future, like to try to get everything we haven?t had.? ?I want a good job, a good career so I can support my own family, live somewhere decent,? she says. ?I don?t want my kids spoiled, but I want them to have a nice life and be able to afford everything.? To this end, Danielle is taking a vocational program so that by time she graduates from high school she will have 40 college credits toward becoming a registered nurse. How does she know that?s what she wants? ?I researched on the computer,? she says, ?and I talked to two people who were nurses and liked it.? Ed is interested in business. He was planning on attending the local community college. Long Branch is a school with a lot of poor children, and Mr. Lipman says that last year, only 51 of 240 seniors went to four-year colleges. But after the teacher pestered Ed, he won a full scholarship to nearby Monmouth University. That would include living in the dorms, although he will stay in the trailer so he can continue as Danielle?s guardian. Mr. Lipman has tried to get them to move to an apartment, but Ed prefers the trailer because it?s cheaper. ?I just need a place to sleep,? Ed says, ?and I really sleep just five hours.? School nights, Ed works the 6 p.m. to midnight shift at Dunkin? Donuts. On the morning of the senior trip to Black Bear Lake, when Ed got off work, he filled the ?96 Ford Windstar minivan that he bought for $1,500 with the surplus from the store ? eight dozen boxes of doughnuts, eight dozen bagels and four boxes of Munchkins ? and treated the whole Long Branch Class of ?07 to breakfast. Most days, Mr. Lipman arrives at school by 6:30. Often, Ed comes early, too, and they talk. One recent morning, Ed brought in two photos he?d taken of himself in the mirror at his trailer. He?d rented a white tux for the prom, but wasn?t sure if he should wear a white or a red shirt. Mr. Lipman studied the photos of Ed in the two shirts and the red tie he?d rented. Then he offered a piece of advice that fathers have been giving sons almost since the beginning of time: ?Eddie,? he said, ?you can?t wear a red shirt with a red tie, it doesn?t look good.?