Fun & Icky Stuff

If I make sound like everything is all fun, then I'm not giving a truthful picture of things. While not wanting to violate any of my children's privacy, I want to be honest about stuff.

I'm going to back up and talk about something that happened the first day of our trip. Background first.

We've had long term continous problems with one child. It is compounded by the fact that he is cute and charming and this combination gets him out of being accountable for his actions too many times. For instance, he had four offenses at school and was given two days in-school suspension. He only served one day because they decided they were too hard on him. His offenses were:

1. grabbing members of the color guard as they practiced

2. defiance to at least three teachers

3. refusing to go to class when the morning bell rang, remaining in the gym goofing around four days

4. messing with a teacher's car and hiding behind it throwing things at other students

ONE day for all this.

Our neighbor boy who is not overly cute and is a little socially awkward poked a child with a paperclip and it drew blood. He'd done it once before back in September so they said he had violent tendancies and gave him 10 days out of school suspension. He served all ten days. He is not violent at all. He just doesn't think.

Another friend had three tardies so got detention. On the fourth, she got one day in-school suspension.

Does anyone else see the problem here? And besides the stuff during school hours, the bus gets there an hour early and he entertains himself in some very negative ways during that hour. So I've enrolled him in a small charter school for next year. That will remove him from the group of friends he shouldn't have in the first place and put him with group who is more closely supervised and who are at this school to learn.

And to show him that we are giving him a new chance, we let him kneeboard with the jet ski, have some extra movie/tv privileges, use the Wii and invite some friends over for a movie, Wii and pizza. The repayment was that he snuck out of his room and logged onto the Wii and sat there playing Wii and using my phone calling all of his friends when he was suppose to be doing his summer reading. This may not sound major but he has certain unhealthy addictions and is not allowed any unsupervised media. And the Wii belongs to Ty and permission must be granted. Since he trashed Ty's laptop, his time on Wii is limited. Wii also has online access.

Anyway, so this breach of trust resulted in him not having a new start. I was going to post pictures of the friends over but realized I'm on my notebook in St Louis and they are on my home computer. I just have this one I posted on facebook.

This was a nice group and they got along well together. One other boy showed up later so both Adam and Jessica had two friends over.

We are having a few issues with the younger ones on the trip but they are less serious and really probably totally normal. Part of the problem is that the twins don't have enough English for long detailed explainations of what to expect on this trip. Kaleb wakes up every night about 1 am and runs around the hotel room. He takes melatonin but that doesn't keep him asleep. He was waking Kayla up and getting her to join him but after two days of no swim privileges, she decided it wasn't worth it. She did not join him last night so she got to swim tonight.

We are also having a lot of running off rather than staying together at fun places despite warnings so that now results in automatic time out. I hate to have to discipline at fun places and of course I get all those looks (you know the one I mean--when you're dealing with a child of another color who is giving all the people passing by a pitiful look) from strangers. But despite the the glitches, we are still having fun.

I'll post more tomorrow about today's adventures. We also register for ICRS tomorrow.