The first is the math he loved doing after school today with the Mathman. X-man is learning division. Check it out. His handwriting (the top numbers) looks pretty lovely, too. It's funny. There are days where he has bad days, and he just can't get himself together to make it to soccer, but he's always happy to go see Mr. Cohen. And I like that. He's like a little math sponge, and he likes it that way. There's no agenda when he goes, just to learn and enjoy it.
The second excitement today was that X-man reached 50 "Terrific Notes." He missed five days of school when we went to Maine in August, so he didn't get those, and he got too many tally marks (you have to have less than five to have a terrific note) on three other days. I was very proud of his work, so I made him a big yellow star to post with it. X-man does his chores around the house with the idea of getting allowance. But I did tell him at the beginning of the year when he brought his first note home, that if he got to 50 notes, he could pick out something special from the Toy Store. So tomorrow after seeing the behavioral therapist, we'll head up to north. I suspect it will take a while for him to pick something out (so many toys under a limited dollar constraint is hard work when you're 6 -- especially if you divide it up between two or three items and your Mother makes you work the money math!), so we're going to eat dinner up there, too. Then I'll take the notes down, and we'll start all over.
The "oooh aaah" Wednesday item is that X-man's teachers gave him a new anxiety chart today. The theory is that he feels from a 0 to 3. A 0 means he's pretty happy and something good is happening. A 1 is that he got a tally or someone bumped him or did something that was annoying or bothersome. A 2 is when someone makes fun of him or he gets privileges revoked for making poor choices. This is when he starts to escalate. And a 3 is when he's really hurt, bleeding or being bullied. The chart gives him a sense of how his day is really going. It also requires him to tally what is happening emotionally and when so that he knows when he's escalating and can use some of the calming techniques we've taught him from April. (We sent his spinner and breathing card to school in case the teachers wanted to use it.) The idea being that by being responsible for his chart, he'll be able to communicate better what he's feeling before his feelings get the best of him.
This is what the chart looks like. You'll see that he wasn't hurt or bullied today (hooray) but that even though MANY good things happened, the number of annoying or frustrating feelings he had through the day was pretty much double the good things. I asked about some of the things that happened in the 2 level. Three of them were people making fun of him. I asked him if he missed activities. He said no, but he said other problems that made him feel really sad and frustrated (everyone talking in class out of turn, someone purposely stepping on his foot, not feeling listened to, etc.). It helped him though because he came home today with one of those special pencils that he missed out on yesterday and had no tallies. Hooray!
The last item has nothing to do with X-man, but it had to do with my mail today. I would like to issue an apology to the trees of the world. I know it's Christmas time, but it took two hands to carry my mail into the house today, and many catalogs (Zingerman's I mean you!) are going straight into the recycling pile.
