shhhhh, don't say it to loud but things are going well...

Look at those smiles, those are sorts of how things are around here right now... pretty good ( you have to whisper that part so as not to jinx it). The raking leaves was a consequence and although there was much whining and attempting to sabotage it, in the end it was mostly done with smiles and acceptance.

I have been thinking this week about how bad things were at this time last year. Calvin was just ending his honeymoon ( though at the time we thought there was never really one). His behaviours escalated to out of control so fast we thought that we had been hit by a truck and we really had very little sense of what to do about it. Thank good for good therapists, amazing bloggers and good books because if things had continued like that I would have jumped off the roof... ( thanks Christine).

Fudge didn't really start until the spring when Calvin started to calm, they tend not both to be in crisis mode at the same time - thank God for that!

That being said they have both come so far, no day is perfect but I see so much progress and it is so nice to be able to sit back some times and just enjoy being together. I do tend to find myself over analyzing each and every little thing, questioning whether a behaviour is developmentally appropriate or not. P and I often remind one another not to over analyze because at some point they are just kids.

Things are going well at school although Fudge did get in some pretty serious trouble last week but mostly because he has no impulse control and is a little boy who has not moved past thinking that making farting noises is really funny. Then he lied to me when I questioned him about his afternoon in the office. He got in more trouble for lying than anything else.

Calvin is hanging in there too. There are some little things going on but nothing they can't handle. He did decide to eat his calculator last week and his teacher handled it with a joke about how good he should be at math now. When she and I discussed it later I let her know that it was probably because he was stressed or upset about something and was trying to get attention. It didn’t really work for him though and the rest of the week went ok. Most days he is happy when I pick him up, there are the regular sort of yard things going on but mostly he seems good.

It's a relief in so many ways that school is not the huge stress that it was last year, just a little stress. It is brilliant that things are staying for calm for multiple days at a time rather than just for a few hours. We have just passed the 16 month mark and it is sort of nice to know that there will be less monsters leaping out unexpectedly and more happy little boys to look forward to.