Raging Dad

Houston, we have a problem.

Not hot for this teacher.

On Monday, Raging Mom went to pick up the boys from preschool, just as she does every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. However, on this morning, she was detained by the teacher who informed her that the twins were disrupting the class. She was very concerned because they had disrupted the class four times by wrestling with each other. Sonny, the one who was starting it all, even had to be pulled off of Michael on one occasion.

Now, preschool is only 2.5 hours long, so by my advanced mathematical skills that is like an average of three interruptions per hour. Unacceptable!

Raging Mom was upset, of course, but not just by the news that our boys are taking on the domestic terrorist roles in their class. The teacher–who is a twin herself, I might add–was very insensitive to Raging Mom. Basically (I am paraphrasing), she told Raging Mom that it may be okay for the kids to behave like violent savages at home, but we need to try to help “back her” at our home by putting the whammy on wrestling.

“Oh no she di’n't,” you say; she did.

Um, we try to keep the little monsters off of each other all the time. Just enter “Sonny” in that little search tool at the top of this page, and you’ll see how much we struggle with him and his attention. Anyway, that lady is dead to me now, so I’m putting her out of my mind. Serenity now.

The “time out” is almost completely worthless in our house now, so we had to find a new way to approach discipline in this matter, and somehow capture the seriousness of the behavior situation. The problem is, what do they have that we can take away? They are only four, after all. They have so many stinking toys, that we can’t really do much there.

Here is where the Raging Parents ended up:

• The boys are banned from watching television programs until we hear from their teacher that they are behaving themselves in class. (They don’t watch a lot of TV, but usually an episode or two of Spider-Man and maybe a Between the Lions, so that Raging Mom can do things like bathe and feed herself.)
• We have canceled a pre-planned trip to a pumpkin patch to pick out big pumpkins for the boys to carve at Halloween. Connie already has hers from our last visit, but the boys don’t have individual ones yet. Now they will have to watch Connie carve her punkin alone.

That last one seemed a bit brutal to me at first, but we felt we needed to have something that really showed that there are consequences for actions. Raging Mom, as always, had a plan for positive reinforcement of good behavior to accompany the punitive measures. When the boys behave well at school, as reported by that nasty woman their teacher, they get a sticker on a sheet. When they receive a pre-determined number of stickers, they can trade that in for something special at a store, like an action figure, a candy or some other crazy thing that kids like but aren’t too expensive. We get them too much stuff anyway, so this helps us be more strategic with our small-gift buying. There are fringe bennies, I suppose.

So, that was our week. How was yours?

Song of the day: “Kung Fu Fighting,” performed by Cee-Lo.