Valentines Day

Unfortunately our preschool/daycare doesn't celebrate holidays of out trying not to offend anyone. <--- Insert eye roll here. But I found a cute craft for older kids to do on Valentines day for their friends. I thought I might do one for each child when I give them a sucker to take HOME. lol

Here it is:
http://jas.familyfun.go.com/arts-and-crafts?page=CraftDisplay&craftid=11581

Is it Friday yet?

So far it's been a shitty week. I get called into the office Monday with some of my fellow co-workers. Our boss tells us that Saturday night at a dinner she finds out indadvertantly we have been given a stay of execution for six months. The powers that be were going to shut down our center without letting anyone know. wtf?!

Apparently some of the money we recieve is from the hospital and since we aren't mandatory for children to get well it's the short end of the stick. The six months was given for her to redo the budget and see if we can at least break even. Starting next week parents are getting a 10 percent increase in their fees. This is on top of the 5 percent that was given over the summer. Alot of misinformation was given at the top, but luckily someone thought to tell Leanna my boss so she could let them know the facts. I th ink they believe that our center is expendable, but 90 percent of the kids there belong to the workers of the hospital. Workers that are not getting raises and may have to pull their kids out of care, workers that may not bother to keep a job they are paying to do. One wouldn't think 20 extra dollars a week would be alot, but 80 a month times however many kids you have and it's enough.

Everyone has been sort of in WTF mode. After finding out that news Monday my dear friend Gabe acts like an asshat ALL. DAY. LONG. I've never hated someone so much in my life and the kid is only freakin FIVE! He pushes everything to it's extreme limit. I've got to exude 199% percent patience so I 1. Don't kill him 2. Don't let him know he's getting to me or he does it even more. Seriously I'm tired of playing mind games with a freakin 5 year old. He's recently decided he doesn't want to nap. Fine, he doesn't have to nap. He does however have to stay quiet which he doesn't do. After 30 minutes of playing around I finally had his nose in the corner and my knees at his back so he couldn't turn around, kick, hit, bite, pinch, etc. He then tells me his mom is going to hit me in the face. I don't answer. Then he says he's going to poop his pants. Do what you need to I tell him. So the little fucker does it! Well the last laugh was on him because I still didn't let him up. Sadly I have to admit him crying gave me a bit of pleasure. Scary isn't it? This is how far to the freaking edge this kid has pushed my sanity. While he was wailing at the top of his lungs he woke all the other kids up about 40 minutes early. I could feel the blood rushing in my head I was so pissed.

After I let him get cleaned up he got to sit at a table until nap was over and until his mom picked him up. Which thankfully for him it was about 3 hours earlier than normal. Last night he was put on additional meds to control his outbursts, but my boss still had to sit with him at naptime. For every minute he chooses to do something wrong is a minute of timeout for him after nap. He sat for a good hour and a half. Kept whining to me he wanted to get up. I was able to pretty well ignore him until he said, "But I don't want to sit here anymore!". Oh really!?!?
You know what I don't want to do? I don't want to have to watch you all day hit, kick, pinch, bite, cuss, mouth, start fights, or intentionally do something I've asked you not to do. I also would like you to stay quiet at naptime so the other kids can sleep instead of scooting around your cot, making loud noises with your various body parts, and generally being a pain. When you can do that I said, THEN you won't have time out anymore. He started crying again. The fake wailing crying until he realizes no one was listening or cared. He's even got the other kids desensitized to his ridiculousness.

It ticks me off that I have to spend a majority of my day disciplining this boy when I could be spending that time doing fun things with the kids who aren't like him. I'm tired of feeling like I need to go on a freakin bender by the time his mom picks him up. I know she is doing the best she can do and he can't help it that he has this stuff, but COME ON!! A little cooperation goes a long way you know? I'm scared of the reactions this kid invokes in me and I hate it. I hate feeling this way toward a little kid.

Sick Sick Sick

I wanted some days off but this is ridiculous! I woke up at 330 am Wednesday morning barfing and having severe gastrointestinal issues. Which pretty much lasted until 330 this morning. All of yesterday was a blur where i went from my bed to the bathroom. I had a bath and shower in there somewhere to try to warm up because I was so cold. Bleh. Now my eyes just hurt. May go back to be awhile.

Preschool news: This coming week we are studying penguins. I have a whole lot of fun things lined up which I will discuss when I don't feel like I have vertigo.

"Gabe"

Today was good this morning, but after refusing to nap and being a little punk about it as well he earned some time out. Seriously if I'm not watching this boy every second he's testing! It drives me crazy!

All in all it was a good day, but my patience are had by the time he leaves.

Oppositional Defiance Disorder

I currently have a child who is 5 years old in my class. Let's call him "Gabe". Gabe is very smart. He should be in Kindergarten but his birthday falls in the wrong month. So he has come to my class to be bored out of his mind. Try as I might it's hard to keep him going on the same thing a 3 year old might like and visa versa.

I've had a really hard time with him coming into our class. Before him we had 2 boys with HUGE behavioural disorders and a few that just didn't listen. They went to Kindergarten, and some others moved. This led to the influx of newly trainable 3 year olds. Our room is allowed to have 24 children in it. About 10 too many when 16 of them are boys that are there EVERYDAY and we rotate 2-4 girls a day out of the 8 registered. Needless to say it is a busy boisterous in there everyday.

Gabe came to us from a home care situation. He was kicked out for causing too much trouble, hitting, attitude, etc. He came right before the Kindergarteners left and that was crazy since the oldest one beat him down a few times. So we get settled into a routine with the older ones gone. He has been diagnosed with ADHD and is medicated for it. I personally believe he has ODD as well. Today has been the worst day with him.

taken from here: http://www.guidancefacilitators.com/odd2.html

"Oppositional defiant children share many of the following characteristics:
· They possess a strong need for control, and will do just about anything to gain power.
Says NO to most requests or ignors you and does what he wants...
· They typically deny responsibility for their misbehavior and have little insight into how they impact others.
Even if I've seen him have a toy out, hit a child, do anything and call him on it he denies it then tries to blame someone else. A few days ago he tried to tell me voices in his head were making him do these things. No he's not schitzophrenic. I told him to tell the voices HE was the boss and he was responisible for them.
· The ODD child is socially exploitive and very quick to notice how others respond. He then uses these responses to his advantage in family or social environments, or both.
This has popped up on many occasions. He very quickly learned how to work the kids in the room. He picks at a few easily annoyed children, tries to argue with us, and has tried to sever a few friendships to put himself in the middle.

· These children tolerate a great deal of negativity – in fact they seem to thrive on large amounts of conflict, anger and negativity from others, and are frequently the winners in escalating battles of negativity.
He's most definitely already on the bad side of most of the teachers. They regard him warily or not at all. I try to greet him each day and treat him as his behaviour allows, but I admit I don't interact with him as much as I could.

His dad is a drug abuser that could be doing/saying who knows what. He hears his parents arguing when his dad is over. Also most of the kids in class don't like him won't let him play with them because of previous stunts he's pulled.

Many authorities on parenting have indicated that oppositional behavior is more prevalent when structure in the home is out of balance – when there is either too much structure or not enough. In an overly structured environment the parenting is rigid and inflexible. "

As stated above he has a volitale home environment where there isn't much structure from the father and ? with the mother. We are pretty rigid with him and obviously that hasn't been working.

When I got in at 9 am he was already in the office for hitting another child then running and hiding under a table to get away from the teacher. *Sigh* So the morning goes on as normal. We have only about 15 children today so it wasn't so crowded and my co-teacher actually had her craft ready so the kids rotated that and we had a fairly uneventful morning. Gabe's behavior was escalating. At first he was pestering others, then he took a few toys, then he saw one of the other children with a Nintendo DS and that kept all the rowdies quiet for a while.

It was then lunchtime and that went loudly, but pretty well. After lunch I REALLY had to go to the restroom. So after lights were out and all the kids were on their cots I WENT! Our bathroom is just outside our door so it shares a wall with my classroom. I hear my coteacher telling him to lay down and quit messing around. That's normal. Then she TELLS him to do it. Then I hear banging which turned out to be him climbing up on the remaining cots to get away from her. When I got back in there ( I had some issues) our Director was in there and he seemed to almost be asleep. She left, then my coworker left and it was my hour on watch.

I generally sit on gym mat on the floor. The table are only 36 inches high so not really comfy to sit at for long periods of time. Since he has come I sit next to him by the front door. During this downtime I'm usually working on craft stuff for the afternoon or homework. Gabe generally sleeps from 12-130. Today he was not going to sleep. I assume he decided he just wasn't going to do it and wanted to fight about it. After reminding him of what he was going to lose to day I gave him a chance to straighten out. In succession he lost 1. His sticker *prize box* 2. Rights to play DS in the afternoon 3. various minutes of the movie we were watching then lost altogether and was working on time out.

I have been thinking on this ODD for some time so I just googled how to control child with ODD and found the link above. I have to say the stuff worked! Obviously I can't change his home situation. He has 2 choices: When he runs away or crawls under the table, etc he can come back now or when he chooses to come out he with THEN do his time out.
I repeat what will happen and do NOT argue with him at all. Not even to try to reason or explain like I might with some of the others. He has already made up his mind and will not listen anyway.
If he hits, swears, runs off he starts out in the time out corner, he can then move up to the alone table where he has nothing to do but sit and watch everyone else, if he can do that okay then he can color or read, when he's done that I try to put him in a group of 1 or 2, if he does well with that I let him choose what he would like to do. Today he didn't get past step 3 but I didn't lose my cool again. I should get a freakin medal for that alone.

A sub teacher was in our room for extra help while were "training" him. She saw him choking himself and kinda freaked out. "Um C? What do we do when he does that??!" Me: Nothing, he wants attention and look now he has it so he quit. IGNORE BAD BEHAVIOR.
Now I gotta try and train the other teachers lol.