Monday, November 27, 2006

Too Many Days Off School


I am having the hardest time getting everybody going this morning. Nobody, it appears, is ready to go back to school. I never sleep well with Bart gone and last night was no exception, though it was good that Mike was here and the phone didn’t ring after 10, which is a miracle lately.

So, I’m up and fighting battles before 7 a.m., for the most part just normal parenting battles but battles that at any moment could jump to a new level of aggression. Sometimes that is a little nerve racking. Last night, Tony, who is only 11, punched me hard in the store -- he was mad that I wouldn’t buy him something. Sometimes where he is headed scares me -- and the psychiatrist says it can’t be medicated and so we have a long road ahead. Since he came at 19 months I think we told ourselves the same lie everyone tells themselves -- if you get them young enough they will be fine.

Well, genetics and those early months have a lot more influence than most people think. In fact, it is amazing how much influence they have.

Today I am going to call the county. John tried to call here for Mike last week. I made my plea to the judge that John not be put in foster care in Mankato because he would have contact with us regardless of what he was told. The judge ignored me and followed the social worker’s recommendation (after I argued with him for days about it) and put him in foster care in a house exactly half way between the two houses where Salinda was hanging out until she got grounded. Salinda already ran into him once, and now he is calling the house. Over and over again the social worker promised me that if he wouldn’t let it go on -- that if John violated the restrictions about contacting his siblings, that he would move him. So today we’re going to observe how the social worker gets out of doing what the promised. John has had contact with his siblings, but I will faint if the social worker keeps his word.

On a lighter note, yesterday in church Bart was talking about the Alpha and Omega and asked what alphabet they came from. Dominyk, who was making paper airplanes and I thought was in his own little world, calmly looked up at me and said, “Greek!”. I told him he was right. We then went on to have an argument because he was convinced that Omega couldn’t be the last letter of the Greek alphabet -- it had to be Zeta. I didn’t even know he knew there was a Zeta.

He never ceases to amaze me.

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