Aimee I'm so sorry Emeline is going through this because she ROCKS! She's a great kid, creative and intersting and I'm sorry the other kids are being mean to her.

I wish there was a buffista group for her.

That's great, smonster, you're doing the absolutely right things and it's totally fine to keep your head down a while.

smonster, for your bed, I'd do a couple of quick aversion things like leaving cookie sheets with coins on them, or sheets of aluminum foil. Both the sound and the crinkle are aversive.

Crating, yay!

How about a baby gate in front of your door? The cats could jump over and Ratty would stay outside.

Things that will occupy a RT...nose games, like hiding treats in nooks and crannies and sending him to 'go find'. As simple as Cagney is, bless him, he LOVES this game. Sadly, he can actually watch me hide the treats and still has trouble finding them. Poor noodlebrain.

Ratties love to dig in search of things. If you have a ratty (pun intended) sheet, tuck a treat in a corner and then rollnwrap it up in the whole sheet. Let the pooch unravel the ball.

Teach him the 'relax' command. This is a stunted 'roll over' where you guide him to stop on his side and put his head down. It is very difficult, physiologically, for a pooch to stay tense when prone.

I recommend Pat Miller's "The Power of Positive Dog Training." Tons of graphically taught games and behaviors.

RTs are super smart (which is much of the problem). If you teach him the 'touch' command...where he puts his nose on your palm, you can use that one command to teach everything from a reliable recall to turning the lights on and off. It involves post-it notes. Pat and/or youtube can teach this.

For inspiration, search youtube for "Just Jesse". Jesse is as Jack, but the breed instincts are very similar...one seeks/destroys voles, the other rats. Verminexterminators, yo.

I forgot smonster asked for advice on the dog and thought bonny was giving her advice for getting out of bed on time.

Ha, me too!

I was all, But how do you wake up enough to put the cookie sheets on your bed? And if someone else does it, where will she hide the body?!

smonster, good for you!

I forgot to mention I finally have the new thyroid medication with no lactose! My stomach is still aggravated with me from the weeks of taking the other pill, but I'm hoping that will end soon.

bonny, thanks for the tips. Unfortunately, a baby gate won't work - Xusha has arthritis so he can jump higher than she can. And he's smaller than both the cats, so he can get where ever they can. Will ponder the other things - I don't want to scare my animals off the bed. Oh, and I've shared your tips with the roomie.

The article we were discussing was more about situations where kids were excluding other kids but not being pervasively aggressive or targeting them. More where kids are figuring out power relationships or not wanting to be friends with everyone and parents overreact, which was not at all the case with Aims and Em, who I wasn't meaning to include at all when I responded to GC and Burrell. I'm sorry if I articulated it poorly; end of a long day and my brain isn't working so well.

I bet smonster would be awake after she unrolled the sheet for her treat.

Perhaps I'm being ridiculously dense, but I fail to see the meaningful distinction that many people seem to see between "kids being assholes" and "bullying."

Eh, I think doing stuff like not being friends with someone/not inviting them places is not bullying. It may suck and kids may do it in an assholic ( or emotionally undeveloped) way, but it's not the same as not being friendly? And then it can totally cross a line into bullying when it's all "everyone is invited to my house...but NOT you" or whatver.

I actually think that that's sort of representative of some of the reasons anti-bullying campaigns are so rarely effective (and they are rarely effective). No one thinks they're the one being a bully because they're not the kid from A Christmas Story.

I can totally see this, though.