It's only the third day of school and he's only in first grade . . .

I found myself chanting this over and over and over again by Friday afternoon last week.  Dillon started school on Wednesday and I was a nervous wreck.  I wanted some sort of reassurance from the heavens that Dillon wouldn't get overlooked or abandoned this year in terms of the extra help he's going to need - and I promise you he will need it.  Knowing nothing about his school resources or teachers, I just had to hope for the best.

 

Last week was a rocky start.  The first day was pretty good.  I dropped him off and then met him outside his class after school.  His teacher said he did fine in the classroom.  The second day wasn't so great for him in class.  And at the end of the day, I met him outside his classroom again so I could show him where to meet the shuttle that will take him to therapy every day- but the shuttle people forgot him.  I called, they apologized a million times, and then they finally sent someone to pick him up- but the point had apparently been completely lost on Dillon by then. 

 

Day three - Friday - I finally get a month's worth of medication to the school (an entirely different fiasco by the way) and while I was there, his teacher came into the office and said that Dillon didn't come in from recess.  She had to deal with another child so she only just noticed.  The bell had rung about 40 minutes ago and they panicked that he may have walked home.  I reassured them that it was more likely that he was still just playing outside.  Sure enough, I found him off playing by himself filling a plastic bottle with rocks. 

 

With that over, I was exhausted and needed a break.  My surgery had only been a week ago so I took a chance that the shuttle would find him today and headed down to my parents house to rest.  Apparently the shuttle did eventually find him because he was at therapy when Neal picked him up.  However, through Dillon's typical honest confessions, we learned that after school he had walked half of a block to Main street where the crosswalk lady was helping kids cross the street.  I don't know how they discovered him because the shuttle never called me and the therapy place didn't know anything about it.

 

And that's when I started chanting to myself.  "It's only the third day of school and he's only in first grade. . . " I drove Dillon back over to the school that evening and we walked from the first grade door to the front entrance where he's supposed to wait -back and forth, back and forth.  And then we went from the playground to the back door - back and forth, back and forth. 

 

Do I think he will remember today where he's supposed to go and when?  There's a 50/50 chance.  He knows the rules word for word when you ask him, but impulse often has greater pull in the moments he's supposed to remember them.  I know we will survive this first year.  It's just a matter of how graceful I can be about it when Dillon decides to challenge us.

Having a sister might make you a better person

I read this article today on MSN (below) and thought I would share it.  After raising Halle for four years as an only child, and then adding Dillon into our family, I can definitely say that siblings do make a difference.  It's such an important relationship, and I think I can also agree that sisters in a family really do make a difference too -although the claim that they make you a better person is a fairly generic statement.

 

 

Though siblings can sometimes be a pain, having a sister might be good for kids' emotional health, according to a new study.

The results show young adolescents who had sisters either younger or older were less likely to experience negative feelings, such as loneliness and guilt.

"Even after you account for parents' influence, siblings do matter in unique ways," said study researcher Laura Padilla-Walker, of Brigham Young University in Utah. "They give kids something that parents don't."

The study is part of BYU's Flourishing Families Project and included 395 families with more than one child, at least one of whom was an adolescent between the ages of 10 and 14. The researchers gathered a wealth of information about each family's dynamic at the study's start and then followed up one year later.

Sisters seemed to help siblings avoid negative emotions. Those adolescents with sisters were less likely than those without sisters to indicate feeling lonely, unloved, guilty, self-conscious and fearful. It didn't matter whether the sister was younger or older, or how far apart the siblings were age-wise.

Brothers matter as well, though their positive influence manifests in different ways. Having a loving sibling of either gender promoted good deeds, such as helping a neighbor or watching out for other kids at school. In fact, loving siblings fostered charitable attitudes more than loving parents did. The relationship between sibling affection and good deeds was twice as strong as that between parenting and good deeds.

"For parents of younger kids, the message is to encourage sibling affection," Padilla-Walker said. "Once they get to adolescence, it's going to be a big protective factor."

Many parents worry about the seemingly endless fighting between siblings. Indeed, the study found hostility was associated with greater risk of delinquency. But Padilla-Walker also sees a silver lining in the data: The fights give children a chance to learn how to make up and to regain control of their emotions skills that come in handy later in life.

"An absence of affection seems to be a bigger problem than high levels of conflict," Padilla-Walker said.

The study is published in the August issue of the Journal of Family Psychology.

One Month and Counting

The transition for foster children coming into a new home has a pretty predictable pattern to it.  In fact, they even have a name for the first phase called the Honeymoon phase.  The first few days or weeks, they try to be extra good and appear somehow to be angel children because everything is new and different. 

 

Once the newness wears off and they realize they are staying for much longer than they expected, it becomes a "crash" time (for lack of a better word since they didn't actually name that period that I know of).  All their trouble behaviors seem to appear all at once.  It's only after this "crash" happens that you can really start working with them.

 

Dillon had about a week of honeymoon, then about two weeks of crashing - literally and figuratively- and now it appears that we are finally at a point where we are making some progress with him.  During his two weeks of crashing, we felt like all we were doing with him was putting him in time out.  I needed a system to help me reward even the smallest good behaviors, so using my accounting instincts, I came up with a dollar system.  They could earn fake dollars for even the simplest things like making their bed, getting dressed and brushing their teeth. 

 

The first few days were brutal for Dillon as I walked out the door to the car in the morning and he's still pulling his pants on and carrying his shoes.  Then he would hit someone at daycare again and lose one and then another.  But he's finally starting to see the rewards now and he's getting really excited.  They both had enough money to buy a happy meal at McDonalds last week at the high price of $20 per meal. 

 

I suppose we will probably have to get into a discussion about currency exchange rates when they figure out how much things really cost :-)

 

Anyway, the good thing is that he's responding to our discipline and structure, which will hopefully translate into more enjoyable family time.  It's just that his impulsiveness (often called Elly- his stuffed elephant) seems to get him into trouble more than he would like.