She bosses people around, mostly her brothers and sisters, like you’d expect a teenager to do. They rarely, if ever listen to what she is telling them to do which may cause her to go into a tirade.

If she doesn’t like what I’m saying to her she is liable to raise her voice towards me and make a smart remark that I don’t think is very smart. Depending on my mood I’m liable to burst out laughing or yell; “Walk away from me now!”

She really likes to wear dresses and nylons to church and some of the girls have commented on her legs. Well her body is definitely maturing physically according to schedule so she has very hairy legs and underarms.

I’m sure you’ll be able to sympathize with my plight here, there is no way I can give her a razor and trust her alone in the bathroom with it. Nor can I, being a conscientious mother, continue to allow her to go into public looking like she’s wearing a costume from “Planet of the Apes.”

Being ever resourceful, so I thought, I gave her a bottle of Nair roll on. I explained that she should rub it on her legs and arm pits, wait ten minutes and then get in the shower and wash it off.

I thought, for a couple of weeks, that everything had gone according to plan and congratulated myself on coming up with a really good idea. Yup, she was happy as a lark with her new badge of maturity and her legs looked as good as any super model.

Since we usually have eight children living at home, each child has a job to do, or I’d never do anything except cook and clean. So my oldest son (that still lives at home) wanted to get his job done, which is cleaning the bathroom, only we had already started the evening showers.

I Knew that my daughter needed to wait ten minutes, after applying her Nair, before she could get in the shower anyway, so I asked her if she’d mind coming out with her robe on so he could clean the bathroom. She whips the bathroom door open and says sure; I already have my robe on. Only she was also still applying her Nair.

That’s when the cold hard truth found me. I’ll admit I let my guard down and I shouldn’t have. When you live with a child with FAS or FAE you need to be vigilant in watching out for them.

Some days they make really good choices and some days they do not. When she opened the bathroom door she was carefully spreading the Nair.

We all stood with our mouths open, aghast, watching her spread the Nair up and down her entire arm from wrist to shoulder not wanting to miss any patch of hair.