Many families today are made up of blended families. It has become the norm in today’s society and most of the time it works just fine. My parents were together until I moved out so their divorce didn’t affect me. If it was hard on my brothers it was because it went from dysfunctional to more dysfunctional.

My ex-husband and I divorced when our kids were young and it definitely took a toll on them. It was also hard on them when we later had significant others and remarried, but, we managed and made it work. I’ve been with my husband for almost 9 years and my daughter, although they argue at times, calls him dad. When she wants to move back home or needs money, its him that she calls. She considers him to be her only real father.

GO ARMY!! There’s no life like it! Sadly, for little Teghan Alyssa Skiba, there’s no life.

Thanks to her mother, 27-year-old Helen Roxana Reyes, and the decisions Helen has made on behalf of herself and her daughter, Teghan’s life was cut brutally short at 4-years of age. It is an endless source of fascination that men who are incapable of caring for a dog or a cat are frequently chosen by women of assumed average intelligence to care for their most precious commodities – their children.

One such sadistic psychopath chosen for child care duty is Jonathan Douglas Richardson. Unemployed and a documented violent nature, Jonathan would appear to be less than a perfect catch, but he never was in want of female company – go figure.

Government web sites state that child abuse is down, although that’s hard to believe looking at the news-feeds.

Recent report Child Maltreatment 2008 indicates the largest area of child abuse was neglect, with over 70% of cases involving the failure to provide the basic necessities required for life – things like clothing, shelter, health care, safety, and…………….. food.

Apparently 50-year-old Karin Faith Martell of Fort Wayne, Indiana, forgot that food is considered one of the essentials that parents are supposed to provide to their offspring.

To be fair, Karin Martell didn’t forget as such – she just didn’t like to feed her children – at all. So the children had to settle for two meals a day. When she felt like it. The children complained that they were hungry…. a lot, and they must have been VERY hungry as they knew they would be punished for complaining.

On August 14, 1987 one of the most horrendous cases of child abuse would hit the news and send the people of Chicago into a state of shock. The pain and abuse that was inflicted on 4-year-old Lattie McGee and his brother, 6-year-old, Cornelius Abraham is inconceivable and one of the most ferocious of accounts I have ever written about.

Police and Paramedics arrived at the South side apartment to find little Lattie lying dead on a pile of clothes. While all the other boys and girls in the neighborhood were playing outside and enjoying summer, Lattie and Cornelius were being held hostage in the apartment of Cornelius’ mother, Alicia Abraham, 28 and her boyfriend, Johnny Campbell, 40.

I would like everyone to meet my grandmother, Beatrice Holecek. Grandmothers are special people you can make so many memories with. My grandmother would bake cookies, pies, cakes and all sorts of goodies to spoil her grandchildren.

I have so many memories of the things we used to do, like going to the playground and feeding the ducks at the pond. I loved to run errands with my grandmother in her 1968 mint condition Chevy Monte Carlo (garaged, of course). This woman had one heck of a lead foot – I swear to God the woman couldn’t cruise a parking going less than 40 mph.

I feel very sad right now. I know that sentence isn’t very descriptive, or very imaginative, and there are probably several different ways I could have written it that would have made it far more interesting, but I’m having a hard time searching for the words right now.

You see, John DeBlase And Heather Leavell-Keaton did some pretty awful things to John’s son and daughter, three-year-old Natalie DeBlase and five year-old Jonathan “Chase” DeBlase. They were the kinds of things that intelligence agencies do to each other’s agents when they capture them and the captured agent refuses to answer his capture’s questions.

I lived in the Houston area for about 6 years, I absolutely loved it. I loved the different cultures, the great food, the historical landmarks, shopping and never got bored or ran out of things to do. Yes, the traffic was horrible and it was hot and humid.

We also had to evacuate for Hurricane Rita but aside from that I had no complaints. I traveled into the city for work and lived about 30 minutes out, if there was no traffic, which was rare.

Inside the Houston city limits there are plenty of seedy areas that most people would try to avoid if at all possible. There are lots of gangs and crime in general. The National Gang Threat Assessment group reports Houston has more gangs than any other city in TX with 225 different documented gangs. Houston has a population of 4 million people, not including the undocumented residents, so I guess it’s no surprise.

Everybody take a minute to reflect on your own childhood.What about your favorite place to go or funnest things you did? What about memories of loved ones or playing with your friends? Unfortunately, not all kids remember happy times with their loved ones. This, my friends, is a story about a beautiful brown eyed angel named Andrea.

Andrea was born to Michelle and Paul Gonzalez in Alabama. Eventually Andrea, her older brother, Michelle and Paul packed up and moved to Illinois. Not long after getting settled down Michelle gave birth to another son, this child was not Paul’s child, so he went back to Alabama.