Doing Their Jobs: Playing

Here are a couple photos of the children playing independently.

On a more serious note, it's been a rough couple days for Anna. She had an awful afternoon with me on Wednesday. Disobedience on every level. Maybe defiance is a more appropriate description. My various discipline approaches didn't seem to have much on an impact. Hoped for a better day on Thursday. But when I picked her up from school the teacher informed me she'd had a tough morning. She bit another child and pinched a second child around her eyelid. She was denied recess privileges. They'd had a firedrill, and the biting incident occured outside, so teacher didn't see if Anna was provoked in some way. Still, no excuses. Between the firedrill and the children's normal schedule being disrupted and Anna starting to come down with a cough, I don't know if these things negatively affected her behavior. Perhaps to some extent, but it's more than that. Teacher said she has been testing her. Example: When Anna gets up from their morning circle time (three times yesterday -- once to legitimately go potty and two other times to turn on the sink water or flush the toilet for no reason.), the teacher will ask her to sit back down and Anna might look at her, smile and take one step closer or away and pretend like she may or may not sit. (She has done this with me and, on occasion, with Mikel.) Needless to say, she had another awful afternoon with me on Thursday. She's having a much better day so far today, but that's all relative.

I did some quick research on reactive attachment disorder, which is common enough among adopted children, and again reviewed symptoms for fetal alcohol effect, and I still feel pretty good that she doesn't have these. I'm hoping it's just a 3-year-old phase. Or that she was getting sick or simply having a bad day. I'm fishing for excuses for my child's bad behavior, aren't I? She's barely 3, after all, which the teacher acknowledged and said makes a big difference in behavior. I'm trying to up my own awareness of different strategies. I've heard a lot about the Love and Logic approach and will seriously consider this and anything else that might work. I told the teacher that withholding her book at nap time or bed time seems to be effective, so at school the withholding of things she really likes might help. Anna really likes recess time and I asked if this punishment worked. But it was such an odd day at school with lots of visitors and people sitting beside Anna while other children played that she said it was hard to tell. Over two days, Anna has had to have three meals by herself in her room. But I can't tell if that bothered her or not. Any suggestions? Seriously. I was in tears.

In some positive news from the teacher, the school tested children, and Anna is apparently a good amount ahead of her peers. The teacher said she was impressed with Anna's scores on their own, without considering that Anna is such a young 3 year old and that she hasn't been in this country for even a year. I didn't dwell on this part of the conversation too much because we do have parent-teacher conferences scheduled in two weeks. But they're only 15 minutes! Sorry school, but I used to interview people for a living, so I'm sure we'll be going over our allotted time. Either that or we'll have to schedule another one.