Friday, March 6, 2009

Huge Progress!

I had a wonderful surprise when I picked Nick up at school today.  The kids are usually outside playing when I come to pick him up so I have a minute or so to chat with his teacher and ask about the day.  She will tell me how the day went and report on his behavior.  Sometimes if she is busy with another child or teacher, she will just give me a thumbs up or thumbs down.  Today, the minute I saw her she signaled me over with a huge smile. She reported that Nick had been in the sandbox happily doing sandbox "stuff" minding his own business.  Another boy out of the blue, comes over and dumps an entire bucket of sand on Nick's head.  Why?  Who knows? probably because they are 4 yr. old boys. In retrospect, if Nick had done that, I may have flipped out and figured something was wrong with him. I wonder if the other kids mom freaked out? oh well...I'll never know.  Anyway, Nick quietly got up walked over to the teacher and told her what happened.  She even said he had tears in his eyes.  This is a major miracle in 3 ways.  First, Nick did not retaliate and throw sand back at the kid, kick him, yell or fight. Second, he came to his teacher and asked for help instead of taking care of it himself. Third, and this is huge. He was sad. Sad that his classmate had done something mean to him. Really sad with tears in his eyes. Not horribly spitting angry as he has been in the past in situations like this. His teacher was thrilled.  She gets Nick and truly loves him and wants to teach him.  I was so excited.  He was excited because his teacher made a big deal out of his good behavior.  When we got home,  I broke into Tony's secret stash of candy and gave Nick a teeny pack of M&M's.  He deserved a little treat.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

great progress! i'm sure you were so pleased to hear about his response!

liesel said...

She is in Ukraine. She will be 4 in December. Yes, she is beautiful. Thanks for asking about her.

Annie said...

That's great - and super that he has a teacher who is helping him learn these skills. I hope he is so lucky in the future! I am trying to teach some of these same things to Anastasia...but one of her teachers is very much into "don't tell me about it". I know the teachers don't like tattling all the time, but when it is the child's outlet rather than retaliation, I wish they'd try to help the poor child out.

How nice that you can see your son's progress. I'm not sure I would have handled that so well, particularly being surprised and all.