It's enough to make you pull your hair out!

Side one.

Side two.

Anxiety is in full swing and Mr. Man had a meltdown that included pulling two big handfuls of hair out.  He has not done that in a long time.  Second grade is proving to be a challenge for him.  His teacher call me recently and let me know that she had already met with the speech teacher and the coordinator for the IEP to have some changes made to meet his current needs.  Awesome! 

Although he can handle the actual problem solving for the math problems understanding the word problems and what they are asking him is a challenge and since he does not like to be wrong or to get anything wrong that is not going over so well with him.  Although he does not act out at school his teacher is aware of how much he is struggling on a personal level and cares about the child.  Love her!

Miss Fabulous is giving Mom and Dad a hard time about homework to put it mildly.  She is displaying typical RAD behavior regarding homework.  She wants an audience.  She gets answers wrong on purpose and then a major drama occurs when she is asked to correct it.  She will carry on for an hour and longer and then finally says oh fine and does the work that she was capable to do all along.

Dad and I made a decision that she will now do her homework at her desk in her room and not at the kitchen table.  She was shocked to hear it but homework moved along at a better pace tonight so who knows.  She cooperated and did her reading assignment nicely.  When asked what it was about she recalled actual facts and had clearly retained the information that she had read.  We were thrilled and told her that because she had done so nicely she earned play time before we took her spelling pre-test.

She felt the need to sabotage herself a bit after having earned a reward and so the spelling test did not go as well as we could have hoped.  However, after she got the nonsense out of her system she spelled the words all perfectly well.  It was amazing to see.  The skills of manipulation are impressive to say the least.

It does seem that yet another teacher has been sucked in to Miss Fabulous trap but I can't hold it against her.  After all she is up against a skilled master of manipulation.  We keep working at it.  We have put in for a conference with Mrs. Teacher.

Miss Fabulous report card was impressive, she in fact surpassed her "gifted" brother by miles.  How's that for scary smart?!

Our first born has lost her Internet privilege for the time being.  When your child goes to virtual school on line that can be tricky to enforce let me tell you.  However, Dad and I have made it clear that earning the right to use the Internet outside of school activity in part will be based on adhering to the restriction that is in place.  She made some unsafe sneaky choices and for her own safety needs to understand why that is not okay.  She is a good kid and really even an easy kid to parent but even the easy ones need tweaking now and then.

Miss Fabulous had her first ever dental appointment today at age 7.  I know bad Mom award but I plead RADical Bipolar as the reason she has not been before now.  I am happy to report that she has excellent teeth and needs no fillings.  Mr. Man also had his dental appointment today.  Their dentist is awesome!  She asked if he was a "juice monkey".  I told her that he had been as a toddler that it was a huge coping tool and it helped his anxiety level to suck on a sippy cup with juice but that he doesn't do that anymore.  He has several "juice cavities" but Dr. Dentist said that once we get those filled he is otherwise in good shape and no worries.

On one hand it makes me feel like a loser Mom who let her kid get cavities.  On the other hand I plead Asperger's Disorder and Anxiety.  I knew the risk but I decided that they were baby teeth, we could get them fixed and if the darn juice helped him calm down so be it.  In the end I can live with it.