the principal's office

Tagg has been in pre-school for about 6 months and we already had our first visit to the principal's office. Well they don't really have a principal at our pre-school but the experience is the same. Here's how it went down...

I pick Tagg up from school and ask how his day was. "Good!" he pipes up from the car seat.

"What did you do today?"

"We were hitting and kicking and punching Bobby," he boasts, in his sweet little chirpy voice.

"You did WHAT?!?!"

And he kindly repeated it for me. Thank goodness he doesn't get the concept of lying yet. I immediately picked up the phone and called the school and sure enough, they thought we should come in for a "talk." Apparently there are four boys in his class who are having some kind of Lord of the Flies moment where they take turns beating the snot out of each other and playing king of the class. One, the little kid, has resorted to biting, which has his parents completely freaked out and desperate. And here's my little hellion, in desperate need of...something. On the flip side, I was strangely happy that it wasn't just him beating up other kids. I mean, at least he's not a bully. Yet.

So how do we change the direction? Well, first of all, we think he's bored and is acting out to get attention. In about a year and a half, he went from being the only child, and then one of two kids with someone dedicated to his every need, thought or question, to one of a dozen little people all trying to figure out their place in the world. And he's really wicked smart. When the class is learning that "red means stop," he knows that a stop sign is a hexagon and stop is spelled s-t-o-p. So we put him in some special programs at school that give him a little more challenge and personal attention. But what else?

Stickers. Yep. Stickers is what we came up with. (Bear in mind, I am beginning to loathe stickers. They are everywhere, on everything. Like mold or fleas. But they work.) We call it the "nice project" and he gets rewarded with a sticker every time he does something kind. The end game reward is Star Wars Legos (yes, I understand that these are the same devil as stickers, but worse because you step on them and they clog up the vacuum and they're just generally awful). I have never seen a kid more motivated to get stickers, and Star Wars, and legos.

No matter what, hopefully, the exercise is teaching him the value of being sweet, listening and helping. Fingers crossed.