If there's a positive to having a kid with an IEP and a mom who volunteers at school, it's that we're never very far from what goes on with Simon at school. To that end, today we learned that Simon got busted for flipping off a female classmate today. The circumstances are sketchy, but it doesn't matter. It's obviously not something that he should do. Ever.
We've certainly had plenty of pre-teen (he's not 13 yet) combat around here, but it has never reached a "you're grounded" point. That's kind of weird given the increasingly frequent arguments about literally everything. But it's one thing to be hostile at home, and quite another at school.
So tonight was, in the strangest way, better because he couldn't just get lost in online gaming for the night. Quite the opposite, the deal was that he had to work his way out of groundedness with a list of chores. There was a little push back at first, but it mutated to doing chores pretty quickly. While this was going on, we were playing tunes, cooking food (and making cocktails) while doing other things around the house. The surprising part was that, at one point, I recall him saying, "I should get grounded more often!"
Diana even pointed out, that it was nice to just have him in the room with us, talking about music or movies or about life. She's totally right about that. I don't like withholding games from him, because it's his safe, unwinding place. But sometimes he does act like an addict toward them, which strikes deep fear for me given the history of addiction in my family.
It does make me wonder if we just have to designate one night a week to no-screen chore nights. It might not be the worst thing for him.
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