Saturday morning we took SD12 to get a brand-new violin. Immediately after this we dropped her off at BM's house. I saw SD get out of the car carrying her violin and I said to DH, You're letting her take it with her?

I have absolutely no faith in BM's ability to care for herself and her child, much less take the necessary care for a $600 instrument. We never even let her take her last violin, which was a rental, over there. In fact we don't let her take anything of value over there because without fail it gets lost, left there, damaged, etc. Well, DH wanted her to be able to take the violin with her because she was so excited, wanted to play it, etc. I didn't put up a fight because I didn't want to be the wicked mean stepmother.

She came home with it Sunday night, it seemed fine, I handled it some to help her put it in a new case for school. I didn't notice anything wrong.

Cut to, this evening, when DH shows me the violin, which now has a crack in the front of it. It's very strange. I feel like I would have noticed it if it was there last night, so it must have happened today at school somehow.

I think it's got to be defective somehow because SD swears she didn't drop it, bang it on anything, step on it, etc, and according to DH of course SD "never lies".

I can't help thinking something happened to it over the weekend at BM's house. We found out later that SD actually spent most of the weekend at a friend's house, and we are guessing that BM spent the weekend with her boyfriend, so the violin was probably rolling around in the back of BM's van all weekend, She is such a bad driver that I am sure it really could have gotten knocked around.

I told DH that I had been surprised he even let her take it over there, and he said he didn't want to "take it away" from her right away. I said it wouldn't have been "taking it away", it would have been following our SOP which is that we don't let anything valuable go over there. He said he didn't think it should have to be like that with the violin, and I said "Yes it should, just like everything else! I wouldn't trust that woman with a stray cat much less anything valuable." He was like "OK, I get what you're saying!" and I'm like, "Ok, I didn't know, because you kept arguing with me about it" and he's like "I'm not arguing with you!"

I can't tell you how many times something like this has happened before, where I've tried to enforce a very strict, nothing goes over there policy, and he lets her take something over there, and it gets lost or ruined. Then I have my I TOLD YOU SO moment but it doesn't actually help anything.

In this specific situation there's really no way to know what happened, BM could be totally blameless. But it's so frustrating. DH is the one who started the whole rule of not letting her take stuff over there. He doesn't even let her take extra clothes, because what used to happen is SD would wear and take all her nice clothes that he bought, and she would come home wearing old, ripped up Goodwill clothes. Anyway, all I do is try to enforce HIS rule and he gets annoyed with me. I know he only let her take it because he knew she would get all sad-faced and pouty if he said she couldn't take it.