I thought I would have to teach my daughter about the world; turns out I have to teach the world about her. They see a girl who doesn't speak,
I see a miracle who doesn't need words.

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Spaghetti Legs and In Some Hot Water!

Yesterday was physical therapy day for Alex. She does a bit of walking for me at home if I stand behind her and give her my full body support, but yesterday she really had a tough time getting any real good steps in. She was crying a bit and doing a lot of biting. You can see just how hard it is for her in this video to keep her body straight - she looks like she has little spaghetti legs. Every time I look at this and see how hard she's working, makes my excuse that I'm just too tired to get on the treadmill seem really lame.


My new camera took this video in very high def and was too big a file to upload, so I had to convert it so it could load and it didn't convert the sound and it's a bit grainy...



On to Mr. Zach...at school they use a behavioral system using a bear and honey pot. It's the same concept most school's use to let parents know about their child's behaviour using a stop light system. Green means you had a good day, yellow means you had to be spoken to and red means you had a really bad day! So in Zach's case, you start the day out with your bear on a honey pot. If you get spoken to on more than one occasion, your bear comes off the honey pot, and if you're really having a bad day, your bear goes into a cave. On our walks home from school every day we talk about what he learned and if his bear stayed on the honey pot all day, which for the majority, it does. Today I picked him up and he had this really pitiful look on face and I could tell something was majorly wrong! A boy at school has been pushing him the last two days, and he didn't want to tell the teacher because he said he didn't want to be called a tattle tale, so we had a very long discussion last night on bullying, and the fact that it is NOT okay for anyone to put their hands on anyone else, that it's okay to tell the teacher because it's not tattling, etc. etc. So when I saw his face today I assumed maybe he had another incident with this same boy. We got outside and I asked him what was wrong and he of course answered, "nothing". So I asked him again and he told me that his bear came off the honey pot and that his bear went into the cave and that the teacher sent a note home in his backpack! Uh-Oh. I asked him what he did, to which he replied "let me think about this for a minute"! He finally said that he was talking too much and not listening to the teacher...which we have also discussed on numerous occasions. We talked the whole way home about when it is ok and when it isn't ok to talk, again. When we got home and I looked at the note, I was completely shocked to see that he left out the part "Another student told Zachary to hit someone, and he did". Not only was I upset that he hit someone after our discussion the night before, but when I asked him who he hit, it was a girl! We, or rather I should say I did a LOT of talking (in a loud voice I might add!) for quite a while and then I made him sit down and write an apology letter to his teacher, and to the girl that he hit. Wednesday's are also written homework night for Kindergarten, so by the time he finished the two letters and his homework, his hand was literally shaking.

Not sure these will show up too well, but here are his letters, and his homework. That's a lot of writing for a Kindergartner in less than an hour!





After he was done with that I made him go sit up in his room to think about what he had done wrong - fifteen minutes later he was sound asleep. I don't know if he's just exhausted from our long weekend and acted out because he was tired, or if it was because it was picture retake day and he was thrilled to be wearing his "church clothes" (dress pants, shirt and tie) to school, or because Aaron had gone up to school and had lunch with him and he was totally excited about it? In any case, I certainly hope he's learned his lesson and his bear stays on his honey pot!!!

As I'm typing, he's laying in his bed singing the Star Spangled Banner on the top of his lungs...and now I'm laughing and I'm slowly getting over wanting to swat him really good!

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