Living on the street in third grade

I know a young lady, 24, who has two kids. I met her at college, she seems like a nice kid, (Kid, where did the time go?), drug and alcohol free, she was living with her mother and stepfather, trying to hold a job down and go to school. I helped her find an apartment last week, low income housing, as she was having trouble getting along in a small house with two kids where she really wasn't wanted.

I go to lunch with her between classes, we study together over french fries and coffee. Yesterday I received a frantic call from her. "What are you doing", she asked. "I'm sitting here doing some homework and being lazy", I tell her. Something about her voice set of alarms in my head, so I said, "You Ok?" She said she had an argument with her mother, her step dad just pushed her and all her stuff was now sitting in the front yard, could I come and help her pick up her stuff, could I let her and her two kids stay with me until she could get in her apartment?

She can move into the apartment on December 1st, a few days away. Ok, I agreed to come over and stuff my car with her stuff and let her stay here. We loaded her car to the roof, loaded my car to the roof, drove it all here and put it in the shed, then headed back for another load, this time we found a friend with a pick up truck. We loaded his truck to the gills, stuff on the front seat, boxes unpacked and shoved into any available corner of his truck, and did likewise with my car. It's the next day and we have two cars in the driveway stuffed to the roof, still to be moved into the shed. Her kids were on the way back from Iowa, on a visit with their Father and his family. They arrived at 4am this morning. We had to drive to the Walmart parking lot to meet them as they would have NEVER found this place in the daylight, never mind the dark of night.

Two very tired, confused and worried children piled out of their carseats and into my car, questions tumbling out of their little 4 and 6 year old mouths. They are very well behaved, I put them on the couch and they went right to sleep.

What about living on the street in third grade? That is the young mother's story, she missed third grade because she was following her mother around from drug house to drug house, wearing her mothers cloths, until her father found her and took her to his house. She stayed away from the mother until she grew up, just last year came to live with her, well, that didn't work out, so for the next few days I have a surrogate daughter and two surrogate grandkids. Should be fun!