Oh, I agree with you completely, which is why I haven't said anything to her family. She is the most needy of all of our kids at church, and her needs are based in a very legitimate disorder and not just self-centered whineyness.

That said... in response to your earlier post... her coming early isn't because she is begging to come spend extra time with me. It's because her relative drops her off early. Her relative likes to be where she is going 20 minutes early, which means she needs to get to her destination at 5:40. And she drops the girl off at our house prior to that... which puts the girl here twenty minutes before any other guests. The other guests show up at 5:55ish - 6:10ish, and we eat at 6:15ish. She's here a full 35 - 40 minutes before the last guests arrive.

It sounds so easy to put her to work doing little jobs. Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way because of her disorder. When I put her in charge of putting ice in the cups, she needed to know how many cubes. I told her five or six. It then frustrated her when she would come upon a broken cube or one that looked like it might break, leaving the person with five whole cubes and two half cubes. When I told her it didn't matter - just so long as there was enough ice in there to cool the lemonade - she needed to understand how we would know if it was cold enough for the cups that just got five cubes. She just can't do a job without having questions about how to handle every possible little variance she might come up against. Did she want me to set the cups with ice in rows on the counter or just in a bunch? How many cups in each row? How many rows? What if someone accidentally took a cup from the second row and left a hole in the pattern? Should she stand by them while people were taking drinks to be sure everyone took a cup from the front row? The questions are really non-stop about irrelevant details most people would never even consider asking about.

We don't set the table - it's buffet style through my kitchen each week - so there really aren't any jobs I can give her along those lines. She is a very nervous and constant talker and doesn't understand about not interrupting, so as my own two kids that need to get out the door are asking me questions, trying to discuss what they need to do, who'll give them a ride home, if they have packed the right stuff in their sack suppers, etc., she is continually just talking over them asking questions like, "Why do you have two trash cans in your kitchen? Why is the light out in the bathroom? Is there caffeine in the kind of drinks we bought?" There is just no awareness on her part that I'm trying to take care of business - she just talks a long string of questions about nothing, really, just because part of her disorder is a nervous talking.

Anyway... I do totally get what you're saying, and don't take offense at all. I wouldn't subject my house to nearly 40 teenagers each week if I didn't think it was important for them to feel a sense of belonging with a group of friends who'll have their back in the bad times and be by their side in the good ones. It truly *is* a blessing to get to host them, and I almost feel guilty, as though we're hogging them at our house. We have the room to pull it off, which is why we ended up with this privlidge - and I truly do consider it a privlidge. They're just awesome kids. And this particular girl has made so, so much progress since her disorder was identified and she was placed on the proper meds. She had some very unspeakable things happen to her at the hands of a relative when she was an infant and that set off a chain of behavioral problems that both broke everyone's hearts... and made her very difficult to be in the same room with, all at the same time. She still has pretty rough outbursts at home, but her public behaviors are much more tolerable than I ever thought they would be.

So... while it is exhasperating, we work through it because we know her history.

It's the relative that brings her so early that I guess I felt frustration with. It wouldn't ever occur to me to leave my children at someone else's home before the hosts were likely to be ready for company to arrive. For our younger kids programs at church we've always had the policy that kids weren't to be left more than ten minutes before an activity was to begin because the adults would be doing prep work (and were already volunteering to spend an hour and a half teaching the kids... and shouldn't also be expected to do half an hour of babysitting before that! )