shaky start!

Well today was day 1 of school for 2010 and let's just say it went rather less than smoothly to begin with. We did a devotion which was on God making us so we are 'fearfully and wonderfully made', then proceeded on to our first science lesson from 'Christian Kids explore Earth and Space". It was on God creating the earth and we read the passage and talked about what God made on each day, then it was time to label contintents, oceans and the equator on a map. Seems so simple, until I asked Jaden to colour in the map before we glued it in his science book.

He scribbled all over the map in texta and you couldn't even actually see the map anymore. I got cranky that he had just wrecked his work and photocopied another map for him to start again. He then burst into tears that I thought his work was terrible and declared that colouring in was too hard (bet no-one's ever heard that from a 10 1/2 year old before) and stormed off to his room. At this point I was thinking 'what on earth am I doing this for, I could've just dropped him off at school up the road, why oh why am I making my life more complicated!!!' But of course if you ask a question you usually get an answer and that little voice was there... 'I asked you to do this, ask me for help.' So I took a deep breath and prayed and then went to retreive the sulking child. We sat and talked about the way we should be treating each other and I acknowledged that I know he does find fine motor things hard and that I need to be more patient, but he has done much neater colouring than that in the past and he agreed he certainly didn't give me his best. So we wrote up a contract.

Mummy agrees to:
help Jaden
not yell
be patient

Jaden agrees to:
listen
do what he's asked
do his best work

it is signed by both of us and on the wall now, so we can stop and remind ourselves of how we are supposed to be behaving. We then prayed together and once calm was restored he redid the map. I declared school done for the day after that, quite enough drama for our first day back and I have my antenatal clinic appt soon anyway.

In the middle of all of this I had an 11 month old baby crying because she was in the loungeroom and wasn't impressed that we weren't. She could see us and she had all her toys, but she is often less than impressed if no-one is playng with her. So I resorted to TV and put Hi 5 on which she actually sat and watched for about 5 mins before she started attacking the buttons on the TV. Juggling school work around her is going to be tricky I think but we are just going to have to be fexible. We started at 8am when she'd gone back to bed (cause she was up at 5am) and when she woke up I sat her in the highchair with some food for a little while, but eventually she wanted out. I think it would've all been timed ok if the schoolwork had gone more smoothly, but we'll just have to see how we go.

So a bit of a bumpy start but I'm happy with how both Jaden and I handled it and am hopeful for better days ahead!!! :-)