Do some people race pigeons? That's the latest question which set off a firestorm in our apartment that stretched over 3 days. Juli's class is studying about birds. ALL semester and she's quite obsessed. Well, she had some homework Wednesday night that involved 8 true/false questions culled from this sheet everyone took home on, you guessed it, pigeons. She answered the questions really quickly. I mean, fast. And I thought she was just rushing it through it so she could hurry on to something fun. I looked it over and the boring "fact" sheet (told in the narrative) and I noticed that 3 of them were wrong, but I didn't want to tell her which ones were wrong because, well, that's one of the problems with true/false--that would be giving the answer away. Seth read the questions aloud (which she had read, I'm guessing, to herself really fast) and she answered at super fast speed-TRUE! FALSE! You get the idea. After the third question--about racing--I said, you've gotten one of those three wrong. Do you know which one? She said no, they're all right. I then decided to tell her the racing answer was wrong. It was not true, not according to the paper the teacher had given them. I asked her to find it for me because if it was on t he sheet, I didn't see it. And that is when it started. She got belligerent and said I didn't believe her and that it was true and then refused to do anything else. Said it was stupid, I was stupid, said she hated me, it then escalated into stomping on the floor (and remember, the people downstairs are not fans of ours to begin with, which Juli knows, and is why she does it--not to get at them, but to get to us). She wouldn't do a time-out, so Seth and I decided to take one. But then she follows us, storming into the room. Because she's going to kick down the door, we go the old route of not saying anything to her and just picking her up and taking her to her room, she would then storm out again, and the cycle continued. She wasn't supposed to watch TV anyway, and she starts turning it on, saying she can do whatever she wants, I'm not the boss of her, etc. And then we became not-so-ideal parents because we felt like we were running out of options and started gathering up her things to "throw out," which we weren't going to do, but we were like grasping at straws. She got even more upset, saying the things we were throwing out were given to her by her mom. So then Seth took this teddy bear he had just given to her and said he'd throw that out (which he actually stuffed in the mailbox downstairs). She was on her bed crying, I go to my room to calm myself down, Seth soon afterwards ends up talking to Juli and they both come into the bedroom and Juli apologizes. Unfortunately...
it happened again the next afternoon. It had been a half-day at school and Juli was doing her homework after having played some learning games on the computer. It was a bunch of consonants and two vowels and they had to make 2/3 letters words, then 4-letter words, etc. out of the letters. She made 5 on her own of the shorter words, but it was overwhelming for her to make the larger words. I pointed out to her on her computer games a bunch of words had ended in i-n-g and that I saw three consonants that would make three 4-letter words. She then kept repeating for me to help her. I would try to help her and I was helping her, then she would say that I wasn't helping her and for me to help her, and the double speak/spiral began again. She then said she was hungry. She didn't like the choices I presented her and then everything that had happened the day before began again but this time without Seth home. He and I were going to see a show and I told him to cancel the babysitter and he could go. I wasn't going to subject a new babysitter to what was happening right now and then I started crying and hung up--he had his weekly show to do at that moment--bad timing all around. Meanwhile, I've got work deadlines I've got to take care of. Juli is not doing time-outs, so I go to my room to finish my work. I have no choice. She begins this assault on the door, practically kicking in, she's stomping on the floor. The whole thing ends up going on for easily 45 minutes to an hour. I scream at her at one point, cursing at her, something I did the night before as well. Before last week, I've done that maybe a handful of times--ever--and now, in the past 9 days, I've cursed at her more than all the other times combined. And then...the doorbell rings. It's the woman downstairs, holding her baby. She's got tears in her eyes saying she's going crazy because of her ceiling trembling and the noise. We're out in the hallway. Juli is stowing away in the closet, overhearing us, which I think is good. The woman wants Juli to meet her baby so she can put a face to whom she's affecting. Juli, of course, refuses to budge. The husband then comes home and comes up the stairs. Long story short, they're both nice to me, but I know, to put it nicely, they're not so fond of Seth and vice-versa, and I have a feeling they're going to try to get us evicted. (cut to the next day: Seth tells me the guy did call the owner of the apartment and said he'd be contacting his lawyer but probably because he knows he wouldn't have a chance in court arguing about a kid, he instead is complaining about Seth running a "music school" in our apartment) Anyway, the upshot of her visit is that she stops her crying. I've now put 4 different things on the table of her favorite foods. She eats them and then begins to cry, saying she misses her mom, over and over again. I hug her and comfort her. I'm crying. She then takes a bath. I call Danielle and begin immediately crying yet again. I tell my sister that I think it's a combination of the school/diability thing and the pain of being separated from her. Danielle listens and says she thinks she should move up here with Mom in February. I tell her that would be great but I also don't want her and Mom killing each other. Mom is having hip replacement surgery in a few weeks and Danielle will be living with her most of December and I said maybe this is God's way of testing the two of them, see if there have been any changes, and that it would be the perfect test run. I told her not to make any decisions now, but to wait and see next month.
What's interesting about all of this is that as much as Juli talks about missing her mom and as angry as she gets at me, she never says she wants to live with her, she wants her nearby, spend weekends with her, because I think even though you'd never know it the past few weeks, I think Juli does, ultimately, like living with me and feels secure (when I'm not cursing) and doesn't want that to change. She just doesn't want the distance, I think especially when she already feels so much vulnerability with the whole school thing.
Seth decided not to go to the show with his friend and he came home around 7:30. We ended up playing a game, talked a bit, and then read some bedtime stories. Not everything was really resolved. I did apologize to her Friday for cursing at her, but she was still pissed at me--maybe just pissed in general--at a lot of things, but by the evening, when I picked her up from after-school, everything seemed to be fine. We all went out to dinner, and then a babysitter came, so Seth and I could finally go out, and when we got home last night, she reported back that Juli was a perfect kid.
Lessons learned? 1) I gotta get those menus together. I do think food played a part in it. 2) Rewards chart. The rewards for good behavior and doing whatever personal/household duties can't all be about television privileges. We gotta vary them, make them fun, and come up with creative ways to earn them. We were talking at dinner about grab bags or levels of "prizes" that can be won--and the prizes could be a bath-less night or going first in the games we play for a whole week--things like that. 3) If she does the homework, let it be between her and the teacher about whether the answers are right or not. This was the teacher's advice, because....the truth is, what started this whole mess--those damn pigeons and their races--what I said was false, ended up being true--Juli DID get it right--AND it was on the sheet, after all--I just missed it when I quickly scanned it! ARGH!