Title : Neighbor Kid Author: MrJenkins Summary: Joe, probably mid to late twenties, met 5yo Ginny when he was an intern at the machinery company where her father, mother and now Joe work. He subsequently went to work at the company when he graduated and presently bought a house next door. When the story officially opens, Ginny is a recent nine and they have been lovers for around six months. Ginny has been planning their wedding for most of two years. Keywords: Mg pedo cons rom slow ************************************************* The Neighbor Kid By MrJenkins -- mrjenkins314@gmail.com Other stories in asstr.org/files/Authors/MrJenkins. Chapter 1 -- in which we meet Joe and Ginny Virginia (Ginny) McCormack showed up in my yard one Saturday morning in early August as I was mowing my lawn. A chunky kid, not fat, but certainly thick -- what you might call 'heavy boned'. She had just celebrated her ninth birthday a month before. I knew because she had invited me to attend the family dinner after. She was tall and heavy for her age, had a broad face with coarse features, somewhat dark complexion and mousy brown hair cut quite short for a girl, to go with her medium brown eyes that were a bit close together. Add in a broad nose and wide mouth with thick lips and you had a girl that while not outstandingly homely, wouldn't catch your eye to ogle at the mall or swimming pool. Good peasant stock was a description that came to mind. None of the above was of the slightest importance to me any longer. I was hers and She was mine -- it had been several years since I had taken any note of the negative aspects of her body shape. I had been her boyfriend since shortly after her father had brought an intern home for dinner the first time -- She had been a little less than six at that time. I had taken six or eight months longer to realize that she had become my girlfriend. Fortunately, her parents had been more amused than appalled by her successful efforts to woo me. Her folks were good people, they lived next to me, the two houses mirror images with the garages only a few feet apart. Her dad had put me onto the house when it came up for sale a year and a half ago. Dad, Ed, was an senior engineer with a company that made custom factory material handing equipment where I was a junior engineer with a fresh degree, hired straight out of college with a shiny new Masters in Engineering a couple of years ago. Mom, Barbara (Bobby), was fairly high up in the accounting department. Her dad and mom were of similar stock, tall, thick and a bit dark complected. One could easily picture her mother as a peasant wife -- hoisting feed sacks, jerking a recalcitrant horse back into line or driving off a wolf which was harassing the livestock if she had lived 400 years earlier. Virginia (Ginny) didn't look at all out of place standing next to them. She was a third kid, with two older brothers, Walt, 17 and Sam, 15. Walt looked just like her, only bigger and male. The middle brother made me speculate a bit on the possibility that a DNA test might show embarrassing results -- not that I had any intention of mentioning the possibility out loud. As much as I had been around the family, her dad certainly gave no indication that he had any problems with his middle son's genes. Ginny watched me mow the lawn for a bit, when the the bag got full, she dragged the wheeled garbage can over to the edge of the mowed area and flipped the lid open for me to dump the grass catcher. When the bag was empty, she gave me a hug which I returned with one arm. When I had the bag back on the mower, she was standing at the controls. I looked at her eager face for a moment, grinned and waved for her to proceed. I watched her for a few moments, she was doing her usual competent job so I left her to it and fetched the string trimmer to clean up the edges. We finished the lawn in a little bit, put the tools away and parked the garbage can in it's spot to wait for pickup next week. "Want a drink?", I spoke the first words between us since she showed up. She nodded, doing her part to keep the word count down. We went into the house, washed the sweat off our faces, arms and hands -- I got out a sport drink apiece and handed one to her. We sat side by side in companionable silence while we drank, then Ginny dug my comb out of a hip pocket and handed it to me, sitting on my knees with her back to me. I combed her hair out, getting most of the grass clippings out of it. I rubbed her back with my fingertips for a minute or two then pulled her into a hug against my chest, fondling her nipples up under her shirt and my other hand in her pants caressing her pussy. She spread her legs a bit to give me good access, snuggled with me for a couple of minutes, then wiggled free, giving my erection a couple of strokes through my pants as she got off my lap. She took the comb and returned the favor on my hair, then back. She stayed with the back rub for longer than I had, knowing how much I enjoyed her touch, then broke the silence. "Can we go for a ride Joe?", meaning my sport touring motorcycle. "Where do you want to go?", I asked her. "Dunno.", her fingers continuing to caress my back. "How far?" "Dunno -- long ways.", she started to kneed my shoulders and neck. "You're cheating again.", I protested. Ginny giggled, she had been giving me back rubs for a couple of years and knew how much I enjoyed them. By now, my protest was an inside joke that didn't require explanation. She knew that a good back rub would almost always get her what she wanted from me if it was at all reasonable, and that if it wasn't reasonable or appropriate I would tell her that without getting mad. I fished out my cell and handed it to her. She called her mother. "Mom, can I go for a ride with Joe?" "He hasn't said yes yet, but he's gonna." "We haven't decided yet." "Yess Mooom.", she handed me the phone. "Ginny says you're going to agree to take her for a bike ride.", her mother greeted me. "Most probably true. She helped me with the yard work then rubbed my back. In the face of that kind of persuasion, I'm helpless. Do you need her for anything before supper time tomorrow?", I responded. "Just where are you planning to go?", Bobby asked. "Dunno. Was considering just starting out and see where we wind up. I could text or email you at each stop to let you know were we are and where the next leg will take us. If I do that, you could revoke permission at the end of any leg." Ginny nodded and grinned, bouncing up and down a little. "OK, I guess. Be good, have fun, ride careful.", Bobby said after a moment's consideration. I hung up. "She says, 'OK'. Go get your riding gear and some clothes, I'm gonna take a quick shower and wash the sweat off." Ginny threw her arms around my neck and gave me a serious kiss on the lips. "Thanks Joe. Wait for me." She departed at a run to pack a bag and get her riding gear. I checked the air in the bike tires, then gathered the stuff that I would want to take for an overnight trip. By the time I was done with that, Ginny returned carrying a small duffel with clothes and a larger one with her riding gear. We washed the windshield and headlight on the bike, stowed the stuff that we wouldn't immediately need, and gave a brief once over to the riding gear. That done, Ginny grabbed my hand and her small duffel and towed me into the house, thence to my bedroom. She tossed the duffel on my bed and held up her arms. Per unspoken orders, I reached down to her shirttail and pulled her t-shirt off over her head, then pushed her pants and panties down. She lay back on the bed and held her feet up for me to remove her shoes, thence pants. For all of her fairly substantial size, there was little fat on her firm body. The nubbins of her budding breasts had started to sprout in the last few months, she had small cones for nipples that stood perhaps 3/8 of an inch above her otherwise still flat chest. Her hips had little flair yet, although looking at her mother, that would start changing soon. Her pussy slit came fairly high on her flat tummy, with a quite prominent pubic mound. I stood there and enjoyed looking at Ginny while I fondled her pussy for a long moment. I was looking forward to watching her develop over the next few years. Her mother certainly had a full complement of feminine curves -- if writ a bit large. She made the stories of women working in the fields till labor pains became too much, squatting, delivering the baby, nurse it a bit then walk back to the homestead to show it off sound quite believable. The tale her mother told me had Ginny's birth lasting less than four hours from the earliest hints that labor was in progress to being in her room at the hospital with the new daughter nursing at her breast. She was in the hospital less than eight hours total, and it would have been less than that if the billing department had been a little more cooperative. (I had heard about that part several times after a few beers with her dad.) Ginny laid there, quietly letting me admire her and enjoying my caresses for a full minute or more, her legs spread so I could reach and see her pussy easily. After a bit she stood and had me bend so she could pull my shirt off. That done, she repeated what I had done for her, pulling my pants and shorts down, then pushing me lay down so she could finish the job. She gently stroked my quite rampant cock for a moment then fished the lube from the drawer in my bedside table and crawled up my body to lay on my stomach and look into my eyes from about six inches away. I hugged her to me for a moment, kissing her with a lot of tongue then lightly scratched her back from nape to as far down her legs as I could reach, using the tips of my fingernails and barely touching her skin through her little girl body hair. After a long moment, Ginny broke the kiss, wiggled down a little and melted against my chest, her head tucked under my chin as I continued to caress her. She laid there for a full minute or more, then raised back up and gave me another long kiss. When she broke that kiss, she sat up, handed me the lube and raised up so I could apply it to her pussy. For all that she was a very enthusiastic lover, she didn't generate enough girl juices yet to make a quickie work well for us at all. We had learned to use the lube unless I was going to lick her to an orgasm before attempting to enter her. Ginny wanted to make love, but she also wanted to get on the bike as soon as possible -- thence the lube. I applied the lube as instructed, putting a little on my cock as well. Ginny moved back, then impaled herself on my cock as I guided it into her. We both wanted to get on the road, so we both went for immediate orgasms with Ginny rubbing her clit with one hand while I thrust into her. In a couple of minutes, I felt my balls draw up and the semen flow into my cock. I gave three more hard fast thrusts then held the last one, buried deeply in my lover as I filled her with baby seeds. As I started to come down, I reached up and tweaked her nipples, that along with her busy fingers was enough to get Ginny off too, the last few weeks she had been able to cum hard enough for me to feel her pussy muscles squeezing my cock under the right circumstances. We lay there in a sweaty cuddle for a few minutes, then shared another long kiss and headed for the shower. We washed each other, I used the shower hose to flush her vagina so she wouldn't be leaking and squishy as we rode, then we got out and dried off. With her short hair, a vigorous toweling, then a few minutes with a hair dryer and brush had her ready for a helmet. We dressed in jeans and fairly heavy long sleeved shirts, pulled on riding boots and went to the garage to complete gearing up. I stowed her duffel, rolled the bike out and put on my jacket. The temp was well above 80 degrees, the riding pants would be a bit too much till we got to higher elevations and cooler weather. I sent her mother a quick text, saying we were about to roll and our first planned stop. We put on earplugs, helmets and gloves and rolled out. ************************************************** Chapter 2 -- on the road Twenty minutes and 12 miles later at a fast food lunch, Ginny giggled at the slightly snippy text message from her mother suggesting that a blow by blow itinerary on that scale might not be quite necessary. My reply told Bobby the name of the town where I planned to stop for gas, about 250 miles out and a little over five hours hence. Ginny and I had been riding quite a bit for over a year, other than the occasional early restroom stop, I seldom needed stop just for her. I had a communication system installed in our helmets so we could talk as necessary, listen to music from my phone or talk to other riders or truckers on a CB. Neither of us was much inclined to chatter, but it was very nice to be able to point out items of interest to each other. We hit a rest area about 80 miles out, a little over a freeway hour from lunch. From there I headed off to the east on a good two lane, we were soon climbing for serious. At around 5000 feet I stopped again and we put on the riding pants and Ginny added her jacket liner. The summit was a little over 8000 feet. I stopped for a second break, Ginny pulled down her pants, and I held her up while she peed in the absence of a rest area. As was our custom she returned the favor, holding me while I peed, which was fun if not nearly as useful. We took pictures of the view and some wild flowers, cuddled for a bit, shared a sport drink then went on. Coming down the other side, I stopped again for pictures. Ginny hadn't been with me on this road before and I wanted to show her some of the view points. Traffic was light, and the big Honda would pass easily in places that one wouldn't even consider in a car. We came down the hill having great fun with the corners. I stopped one more time for a rest break at a convenience store down in the valley. We filled up, pretty much on schedule -- by then Ginny and I had decided to sleep in a town another 125 miles down the road. With supper and check in, that would put us in the motel room 8:30 or 9:00. Ginny texted her mother from my phone while I filled the bike. We fiddled around for another five minutes stretching and relaxing, then got back on and headed for the town where we planned to have supper. Supper, then another short hour on the bike put us in the Motel-6 parking lot. I had made an online reservation when we decided to sleep here, so we had assurance of a pair of beds. Ginny decided she wanted to go for quantity for tomorrow, so we spent half an hour on my laptop laying out a route that would take us home in about 700 miles, then uploaded it to the GPS. It being summer, her mother approved a 10PM arrival time at home with only a little wheedling from Ginny. Most of it would be freeway and only one big city to get through. Per established practice from previous trips, Ginny got into her bed, covered up and lay there for a count of ten, then switched to my bed and snuggled into my arms for the night. Since we were feeling no time pressure this time, we lined up in a 69, she was able to reach the end of my cock while I licked her pussy. In a few minutes we both came, then reversed and I slid into her without artificial aids. We lay there cuddling and kissing a little while we rested from the first round, then as I became hard again we had a mutually blissful twenty minutes of fucking to finish out our love making. When we were done, I wiped her up a bit, put a fresh towel to replace the one that we had used to catch the wet spot, and drifted off to sleep in my lover's arms. If you can imaging a better way to wake up than having your lover kissing your face and neck with quick butterfly kisses, keep it to yourself. I don't think I could survive anything better than that. I returned the kisses for a few minutes then we mutually rolled out to hit the bathroom. We washed each other's genitals then went back to the bed, used the lube to make a morning quickie work, using the second bed this time to make it look slept in and recycling the towels from last night. When we came down from that high, we indulged in another five minutes of cuddling, then hit the shower, thence check out, thence breakfast. We pulled on to the freeway a little after eight. It would require a third tank of gas to make it home so I didn't try to crowd the 300 mile range on the bike. We did the day in blocks of 100 - 150 miles with fuel at every other stop. An hour or two after breakfast, I pointed out to Ginny that we were doing this at a pace that would easily get us an Iron Butt Saddle Sore award if we went the whole thousand miles, and today's schedule would be nearly good enough for half of a BunBurner Gold, 1500 miles in 24 hours. That got me silence for 15 or 20 minutes then a set of questions about what it would take to get the awards. In another hour we had a tentative plan for the 1000 / 24 in a few weeks and she was disappointed when I pointed out that we probably couldn't do both before school started that fall. Besides, I pointed out, trying the 1500 when we would have to plan on sustained temperatures below 40 degrees at night probably wouldn't be a good idea, excellent riding gear with electric jackets not withstanding. During supper, Ginny managed to get permission from her mother to sleep at my house when we got in. The dynamics of that one were something that I pondered on frequently. I couldn't imagine that her parents weren't aware that Ginny had managed to work her way into my bed over six months ago and was currently getting laid several times a week. We had discussed how to open that can of worms off and on since the three day weekend when she had convinced her parents to allow her to stay with me instead of going out of town with the rest of her family. So far we had been using the ostrich method, and getting away with it. ************************************************** Chapter 3 -- Engagement (we hope) The email waiting for me on my phone when we got home made me pretty sure that the ostrich was most probably at end-of-life and about to become cowboy boots, Ginny and I were commanded to dinner and a family meeting the following evening after work. I delivered Ginny to her summer day care on time, but work suffered Monday. I dithered between marriage plans, escape routes and methods of acquiring a new identity, or how to survive a jail term. Neither Ginny nor I ate much at supper, she was a very bright kid and was as aware as I what the current social penalties might wind up being for our relationship. Her brothers were spending the night with friends. This made us even more certain that 'the jig was up'. Her parents picked up on our tension, "It'll be fine guys. You aren't in trouble with us yet, this meeting is intended to head off trouble rather than meet out punishment.", was Bobby's comment. After dinner, Ginny crawled into my lap in what had pretty much become 'our chair' when I was at their house. She was getting heavy enough that she could no longer use my lap as her default seating, but I certainly wasn't going to push her out tonight. "Relax Joe-n-Ginny.", Ed said. "At present, we contemplate neither shooting you nor calling the cops. But it does seem to be time to discuss your status as a couple and future-son-in-law, that seeming to be the way you guys are heading. And to bring up the necessity of birth control in the near future." I didn't quite dare look at Ginny -- I expected that 'deer in the headlights' approximated the look on my face at the moment. He looked at us for a moment, then with a wry grin, "I strongly suggest that the two of you forgo your plans to make your living at the poker tables in Vegas until you learn better facial control." That comment didn't help me, I added blush to the current expression. This time I did look at Ginny, her face looked much what mine felt like. "To simplify the rest of the conversation -- First off, Bobby kicked my feet out from under me when I was nineteen and she was eleven. I didn't try to run away from her real hard. We had this conversation with her parents not too long after. Which is part of why we aren't freaking about the two of you. Secondly, let us stipulate, without requiring confirmation from you two, that you have been lovers since late February when Ginny spent the weekend with you. Neither Bobby nor I expected your virtue to survive the weekend, Joe. It was very clear to us that Ginny had plans and you didn't have a big enough stick at hand to defend yourself. Besides, the difference in the way the two of you interacted afterwards was quite marked where we were looking for it. So, can the two of you swear with a straight face that you have not been lovers at least occasionally since then -- from the look of you, I would bet on within the last twenty four hours?" The accused sat mute, if rather red faced. "Hearing no dissent, we will conduct the balance of this discussion on the assumption that the foregoing is substantially correct." More mute. Redder faces. "So, Joe. A direct question, requiring an answer. What are your long term intentions in this matter?" Ed sat back, clearly giving me time to formulate an answer. The dithering during the day had at least given me a clear answer for my wishes here. "Assuming you will permit it, do my best to be a good boyfriend/fiance for now, marriage in nine to thirteen years, do my best to be a good husband and parent after." "Why that time frame?", he asked. "A little less than 9 years till her eighteenth birthday, she should have a degree in around thirteen. That was the thinking for the estimate. Keep in mind that this is my off the cuff answer, we haven't really discussed anything beyond the fact that she announced her plans to marry me over a year ago and I agreed that if she still wanted me when it became possible, I would marry her. That event was in your presence as I recall and you didn't forbid it at the time. I have no hint that she has backed off on that declaration since.", I answered him. "Ginny?", he asked. "Mine.", wrapping her arms around me and burrowing a little closer, was her one word answer. Beat, beat. I hugged her against me tightly for a moment and echoed her, "Mine." "Well dear, I would say that's about as unambiguous an answer as we could possibly ask for.", said Bobby to Ed. Another wry grin from Ed, "OK, Bobby and I will accept that as a formal declaration of intent." "Given that, what are your plans for birth control, and/or child rearing?", Ed asked. "I had my first period at about 11-1/2.", put in Bobby. "You two are on a fairly short fuse. Within no more than a year and a half, the risk of unprotected sex is going to become unacceptable. We do assume that you two don't intend to start a baby before Ginny is twelve." Long pause. "No, starting a baby would be a very bad idea for at least eight or nine years. I guess I just assumed that Ginny couldn't get pregnant for most of four years and had it filed under problems to be dealt with later. From what you say, that no longer sounds acceptable.", I answered after a bit. "I note that Ginny is starting to grow boobs. I had some hair by my eleventh birthday and was definitly fertile by my twelfth. I have no reason to bet, especially at these stakes, that Ginny will be any slower than I was.", Bobby stated. "Well, love.", I said to Ginny, "It sounds like serious research into methods of birth control is in our immediate future." She nodded. "Do you expect Walt and Sam (Ginny's brothers) to be a problem in our relationship?", I asked the 'rents. "They are both, of course, well aware of Ginny's attachment to you. I'm quite sure that Walt believes that the two of you are lovers and accepts it. I don't expect them to cause trouble. We'll take them aside and make sure they know how much trouble it might cause if they get to talking in the wrong circles. They both like you Joe, and I doubt they will have any problem at all with the notion of you as a brother-in-law so long as Ginny is happy.", said Bobby. "Another issue Ginny.", said Ed to his daughter. "Joe is about to get a promotion to field engineer. This will involve a lot of travel on his part. Field engineers typically spend over 25% of their time on the road, in blocks of up to three weeks. Not uncommon at all to have three or more of those blocks back to back with no more than a week between them. He will probably hold that position for around five to eight years. Are you willing to support him in his career and put up with the needs of his job? Given your age, it will be very seldom, if at all, that you might be able to go with him." I had been sort of expecting this, the progression of responsibilities had been laid out for me when I signed on with the company, but hadn't thought it through in relation to my nine year old lover. It was Ginny's turn now to sit in thought. After a few minutes she spoke, "You did that for a while didn't you daddy?" "I did. It was an interesting, challenging and stressful time. I got to see a lot of different places and work with a lot of different people. Some of the places and people weren't a lot of fun, but overall it was a good time except being away from your mom and your brothers and living in hotels a lot. Your mom and I didn't have email, chat and texting the way you guys do now, the phone company got fairly rich off us." A few more minutes, "If momma did it, so can I.", Ginny said quite firmly. More silence for several minutes. "What would you suggest for birth control?", I finally asked Bobby. "That subject's a bit outside the realm of my expertise." "We'll need to look into that one, we have a while. I don't have current knowledge about what might be available for young girls either. There must be something, I'm pretty sure that girls aren't any less active now than when I was that age, or for that matter, my mother and yours. And all things considered, not very many of them wind up pregnant." We sat there for a while longer, the subject seemed to have played itself out. After a while I stood to go home. There was no formal discussion on the matter, but Ginny went home with me. ************************************************* Chapter 4 -- Fully engaged and off to school. From there, Ginny effectivley moved in with me whenever I was home. As Ed predicted, I moved up from junior house engineer to junior field engineer. This had me doing a lot of travel to customer's plants, surveying the problem, then bringing info home to design the equipment that would be built and installed. When the equipment was ready, I was a part of the team that would get it installed, working and the customer's production and maintanance people trained in the proper care and feeding of their new toys. Ginny and I lived in my house anytime I was there and she lived with her parents when I wasn't. At her mother's suggestion, Ginny started to learn to cook and how to manage a household. Ginny could see the need and put some serious effort into the task. It was a bit of a shock to me the first time I came home from a trip and found a full fledged dinner waiting for me with Ginny proudly serving. It was nowhere near a perfect dinner, but was mostly quite edible. Certainly it was no effort at all to enjoy what my lady was serving to me. I was a pretty good cook, and her mother was superb at the style she used. By the time Ginny was 12, I would have had no qualms at all about bringing my boss home for her to feed him. Other issues might have been a bit dicey, but not the food or service. Ginny finished fifth grade in the public school. She did OK but was suffering from the same problem I had, she was much brighter than average, and spend a lot of her time waiting for the teachers to say something new. In some of her classes, the teacher would allow her to read so long as she kept up with the subject. In others the teacher wanted everyone to be good little kids and listen attentively. She tended to not do well in those classes and was gaining the rep of a troublemaker with the administration. With Ginny's eager cooperation, we managed to work a deal with the school where she could keep doing soccer and swimming, with our jobs to allow Ginny to be with one of the three of us for an average of a couple of hours a day, and we could work part of the time at computers at home. With that a high end cell phone for each of the four of us, and the fact that Ginny was a pretty well behaved kid, she moved into home schooling. In a few months we managed to hook up with three other sets of parents that had 'gifted' kids about Ginny's age and school level and were similarly schooling them -- we arranged to share tutoring and child care time and between being in the company of their intellectual peers and real competition, the kids took off. That also nearly eliminated the problems with scheduling at work. We were allowed flex schedules when we needed to take our turns at being tutors, and the kids had adults available most of the time. They finished sixth grade by about the first of March of Ginny's tenth year and moved right into seventh. Since it had taken over two months of sixth grade for us and the kids to get up to speed, it was unsurprising that they were far into seventh grade by the first of June. They/we elected to keep going. They took a two week break the first part of July -- the border between seventh and eighth grade work, and only averaged four days per week for most of the summer, including doing school on many Saturdays. Both the kids and the parents were able to be quite flexible, while they certainly took turns, we averaged having one of the four missing for most of the summer. That made Ginny starting eighth grade work at about the same time as her eleventh birthday. By then she had been wearing a bra for over six months and had a fair sprinkling of pubic hair. Of far more interest to us, she was able to have full fledged orgasms and could lube well enough that we seldom used the tube lube anymore. By fall Ginny and two of her buds were nearing the end of eighth grade work. One of the original four dropped out, decided that having to work at school and not having the social life with gossip and clothes wasn't worth it. It may have been the right decision for her, she was a very pretty girl, blonde hair and blue eyes, a slender frame and she liked to play the clothes and social game. She did wind up with a degree and a quite wealthy husband, he wound up very high in the food chain at a major business as a marketing manager. Near as I can tell she is content with her life and her quite attractive and bright kids. At any rate that is a tale for a different day. This tale is mostly about Ginny and me, and incidentally the other kids that stayed the course. By now the parental group was more familiar with the system and we did a bit of advertising for additional kids. We picked up three more kids with compatible IQ levels and parents that were willing to contribute to the schooling as we had been doing. That gave us a group of six kids with a wide range of skills available from the parents. If anything this ratcheted up the pace another small notch. Some of this tale might make it sound like the kids did nothing but classwork twelve and fourteen hours a day seven days a week. Not necessary. Not at all. They were very bright kids with good coaches. They did work more than the typical middle school or high school kids would have, but that's not a very high hurdle. They actually worked a lot more -- and spent a little more time on study than the kids in the public system. What they did was much more focused work, with only enough repetition to bind the knowledge. Instead of six weeks on compound fractions, I spent five days. We worked pretty intensively on them for those days, then they would have several compound fraction problems in every homework batch for the next couple of months, then the occasional one every few batches from then on. I managed to work it so we would do some science or business sort of work than soon required some math to deal with. We would then pause and work on the math necessary to deal with the problem, work through the issue then go on to the next level. One of the projects turned out to go on for months. One of the dads was a model train geek. He donated a large section of his basement and what turned out to be quite a lot of money for the kids to build a train system. Five of the six kids took after the engineering class and we built quite a setup over the next couple of years. Model train systems might not sound like school work, but if you are doing it for serious, there is geometry and a lot of other math, a lot of electronics with all the math and science required to learn them properly. In today's world, much of what used to be done with analog electronics is now digital. Which starts to get into discrete math, logic and certainly lateral thinking. Road beds, bridges and trestles require geometry and careful work. A lot of calculation and thinking is required to build a bridge from raw materials, even if the bridge is only three feet long and has a total height of eighteen inches. Because of cube/square issues, strength of materials doesn't really apply to model making the way it does for full scale construction, but we did most of the rest. You might think that ten and twelve year olds couldn't possible learn CAD. Wrong. *My* kids not only learned how, they learned why. Time spent with power tools to make parts from raw materials to the precision necessary is a more than useful skill. Contrary to popular opinion, even a bit of bleeding and pain will teach valuable lessons to kids so long as permanent damage to body parts is avoided. I had one great advantage, the punishment for excessive bleeding wasn't scolding or grounding. It was having to watch their classmates use the tool for the next couple of days. It worked very fine. For the most part they managed to take turns at bleeding, and very seldom caused bleeding in fellow students. They understood that was a very serious no-no, only exceeded by any intentional cause of harm. One interesting time was when Ginny got into a real fight with one of her fellow students. Billy was a bit of a cutup, and had a bit of a vicious streak as well. He came up with a series of comments about big girls, comparing them to oxen and elephants. He wasn't subtle, and about a week into the campaign, he went too far and Ginny blew up on him. At that age, she was quite a bit stronger, heavier and better coordinated than he was. He had to have a tooth reinstalled, had one track across his face that came awfully close to an eye, and she finished him off by breaking his right arm. That one was mostly bad luck on both their parts, by then he was trying to get away and stuck his arm into a narrow place, Ginny caught up with him about then and hit him with a full body tackle, jerking him sideways to the crack where he had his arm. That ended the fight, more because Ginny could see the damage she had wrought than because he was clearly the loser. His arm was bent near ninety degrees halfway between elbow and wrist with the lower half of his forearm still in the crack. To both their credits, they put the mad behind them and coped with the problem. By the time the adults got involved, Ginny had called for help, gotten Billy out of the crack and sitting down and was doing a credible job of rigging an emergency splint. Billy was crying some, but was actively cooperating with her efforts. One of the things that I was forever grateful for was that I wasn't involved in the immediate aftermath. By the time I found out about it, the full set of parents had done a full investigation, pretty well ruled that they were even in blame and punishment at that point and that further punishment would be redundant. From that point on, Billy was civil to Ginny and she accepted it and didn't seem to hold a grudge. ****************************** This last section clearly needs more work to make the story work out right. Also, it will be at least twice this long before I quit on it -- perhaps on towards ten times. For now, enjoy. I will post again when I get a significant addition done.