Category Archives: family stress

and so ends the great debate

Our youngest son David loves to argue.  Everything for him is something that can be debated.

Tell him that he needs to clean up his kleenex, and he will tell you why he can’t do it, and he might use something you said yesterday to him as an excuse.  Tell him he needs to eat his supper before he has a snack, and he will tell you that he ate his supper and then will tell you what he ate for lunch.  When you ask him who made this supper, he would say, so and so made it for me at lunchtime.  Well, since it is 6:30 in the evening, you need to eat a regular meal before you have a snack.

For discipline, one of the few things that works is to have him cover his head.  Normally we don’t keep him under there for more than about 10 minutes.  1 minute for each year of his life.  But, he will pop in and out with different questions, excuses and arguments for the next hour and never fully be disciplined for 10 minutes.  It doesn’t matter to him that he has been there for an hour, all that matters is he didn’t have to be under the blanket for 10 minutes.

So why had the debate ended?  He fell asleep. 🙂  I love him and tomorrow is a brand new day!

 

if I pull any more hair out, i’ll be bald

David is in full form tonight.  He is all wound up and attention needy.  Which means that he will do whatever it takes to get attention. Positive or Negative.

Now, some people say “ignore him”.

Easy for you to say, you don’t live with him 24/7.  When he gets like this the other kids hide, and everyone is just along for the ride.

So I am trying to keep him busy.  As part of that, I grant him amnesty for cleaning all of the stuff out of his play area that doesn’t belong to him.  Since he has a pretty serious issue with taking things that don’t belong to him, we can end up with quite a pile of stuff on the kitchen table.

Oh, wait, I hear his brother crying out David’s name in a way that can only make your nerves quake.  Time to mediate the fight.

If you need birth control, we will have you over for dinner one night, that should fix that problem.  In all seriousness though, even with the benefit of his many blessings, I love him dearly.  Just some days it gets to be a bit much.

 

Parent Teacher Conferences. fear or bravery?

I don’t dread parent teacher conferences for any of my kids.  Mostly because we keep such close touch with their teachers that we aren’t surprised when conferences roll around.  This doesn’t occur with our youngest though since we are home schooling him.

Before this Spring, the teachers would quake in fear when they saw my wife and I coming.  Mostly because we had to pull teeth, nails and hair to get things that they should have provided without a fight.  In the case of our youngest, we are still fighting, but feel that his needs are better met with us through home school.  Sadly, he is missing so much by not being in public school.  He misses his friends, he misses interaction with other adults, he misses PE, music, and what not.  But he doesn’t miss getting assaulted on a regular basis, he doesn’t miss being restrained, he doesn’t miss being made to feel inferior to others.  He doesn’t miss being locked in a room by himself.  He doesn’t miss being threatened with intervention by the Sheriff Department.

Today he has a calm about him most of the time.  He still is very hyper.  We do school work when he is capable of sitting still long enough to do it.  Rather than forcing the issue, we work around his needs.  Regrettably, the school hasn’t wanted to think about that possibility.

In time, hopefully we will be able to return him to public school.  Until then I am satisfied that we can meet his needs.  After all, my wife and I are both teachers.  Albeit, I am used to teaching college students, this is a change for me.

The transition to junior high / middle school for our two oldest boys seems to be going smoothly.  Hoping that it goes as smoothly when our youngest gets there.