No hits!

Poor Alex has been having a hard time lately.  I've noticed that Ella has really settled into a pretty good place: she's been happy about going to school, which is a relief, and she seems to feel more comfortable about her relationships at school.  And she's been getting her homework done like a champ.  And Joey just trips along. Although he gets grumpy sometimes as he starts to realize, as two-year-olds must, that  life doesn't revolve around him, he's generally sweet and good humored.

But with Alex, he's seemed a little less joyful.  Especially when it comes to school: every morning and every evening, now, he tells me how he doesn't like school, doesn't want to go. "I don't like the toys, mom." "Linus doesn't let me play with Nikkos, and Nikkos is my favorite." "The teacher isn't so sweet." The thing that puzzles me is, every day when he comes home from school, he's all sunshine: "Oh, school was great!"

So I'm not sure if his complaints about school are parroting Ella, or, more likely, an expression of a more general unhappiness or anxiety.  With all my kids, I see these moods come and go. We all have rough patches, I guess.

But, in addition to his anxiety, this mood is manifesting in another way. We're dealing a lot with a lot of that sneaky picking that we middle children are experts at doing.

I distinctly remember telling my sister on many occasions, "I'm having a party and I'm inviting one million, one hundred and fifty ten, six hundred and a million, forty-ten thousand, three hundred and six people...and I'm not inviting YOU!"  Ohh, that would make her so mad!  She would feign indifference for a little while, but then, I could see her start to worry. What if there really was a party?  What if mom and dad really were springing for the party of the century? And what if she missed it? Okay, maybe she wasn't thinking that at all...probably, she was just sick to death of me.  But I loved being able to make her explode.  That was power.

So I know exactly what Alex is thinking when he just barely touches Ella with his toe, not quite on accident, or starts singing a different song, loudly, when she's humming under her breath, or, his new favorite, makes a face at her behind my back.  Ella, sensitive as she is, will reliably combust. Power, and in a world where he doesn't control a whole lot.

I suppose a certain part of it is that siblings will fight, and I can only do so much to control it.  But I can, at least, control the way they work out their frustrations.  Which brings me to the hitting.

I've mentioned before, the kids here are a lot more aggressive than the ones in our neighborhood in Kirkland, at least the ones we run with.  Here, they regularly fall into heaps to wrestle, or they play at war, or they punch each other without provocation.  So, I suppose it's only natural that Alex, watching this all with his wide blue eyes, might try this out at home, to see what the consequences might be.  He would never dream of trying this out at school, for the record.  He's always a perfect angel in public.  But he definitely has started whaling on his brother and sister at home when he's upset, which has led to the same from them.

It got to the point when Joey, when he was told, "No! No hits!" looked at us with absolute incredulity, and said "Yeah, hits! Yeah!"  He's kind of rough and tumble, and hitting's become a game.

So then what do you do? Time-outs help, but for cooling off, not to curb that hitting instinct.  We gave the kids a jar of jewels, called it a House Cup, à la Harry Potter, and told the kids if they filled it they could see Cars 2. That helps some, too.  But I think the consequence, not seeing a movie, is too far in the future to be truly effective.

Then I thought of that old chestnut, the swear jar.  And I told the kids that, the next time I saw them hitting each other, they would both owe me a franc.  That's a lot of money for them: I'm tired of messing around.  The first time I broke up a fight and demanded my money, they both were too shocked to complain and trotted off to their rooms to open their piggy banks.  By the third time, however, they were starting to rebel.

"This is ridiculous!" Ella spat out.  (I'm sure if she knew a saltier word, she'd have used it.) "You don't pay us for good behavior! Why should we pay you for bad behavior?!"  I explained to her that, well, I did pay them for good behavior: they got jewels. "Yeah, but...but this is a whole week's allowance! Pretty soon I won't have any money at all, and I had almost nine francs saved before!" I reminded her that she was the one who chose to hit or not hit.  But she wasn't convinced, so I decided to really level with her.

"Ella, I'm worried that you're getting into a really, really bad habit.  What would happen if you hit someone at school?  Or what would happen if you hit one of your friends when we went back to Kirkland? And what if you really hurt each other?"  That wasn't a concern.  She has more confindence in her self-control than I do.

So then I explained to her that seeing people I loved, hitting each other, was deeply troubling to me. "How would you feel if I started hitting Daddy? That would make you really sad and worried, right?" I'm not sure I should have planted such a disturbing image in her mind, but it really sank in. She hasn't really been aggressive since that conversation.

Alex, though, now has an empty purse, and he spent an afternoon washing windows and cleaning up toys to work off his debts."

"Alex, honey, why? Why are you doing this?"

"Well, mom. I'm practicing to be a teenager. Teenagers hit and are really mean, and I need to learn to be one."

What?? Wait...What?? Where did that come from??

I explained to Alex that most teenagers are really, really nice. They help their mommies with chores, and take care of their younger brothers, and they look out for their older sisters, and they do good things for other people, and they listen to their mommies and daddies, always. Okay, so maybe there's a little wishful thinking there, but, I swear Alex looked relieved when I told him this.  I'm not sure where he got the idea that he had to learn to toughen up, but I think he's convinced, now, that it's okay to be kind.

More than that, Dennis and I are doing our best to give our middle child some extra attention. Scooter rides, just with him.  A few rounds of the dreidel game (!) or Candy Land or Kinder Bunnies. Some extra snuggles at bedtime. It seems he can tolerate anything after fifteen minutes of focused attention.

And it was during one of those play sessions that I think I finally figured out what's eating Alex.  An ah-ha moment for me that will probably more of a "Well, duh" moment for you.  We were playing a card game, and one of the cards had a picture of a cat on it.  And Alex completely lost his cool when I tried to take the cat card: "NO! Not KITTY! My KITTY!" He was on the ground, inconsolable for a couple of minutes.

A couple of weeks ago, we got a note from our housesitter that our cat, Angel, had run away from home, and we've sort of realized, by this point, that he's not coming back.  I knew Alex would take the news hardest: he loved that cat, and they would sleep together every night.  And I expected tears and sorrow.  But I didn't expect aggression, especially not from my most gentle child.

I guess it makes sense, though: when we moved here, Alex was incredibly concerned.  Would our housesitter break his toys? Would she sleep in his bed? Would she give back Angel when we moved back, or would he be her kitty, now? I'd promised that everything would be okay and it would all be the same, and as far as broken promises goes, this is a big one.

So I'm not quite sure what to do now, other than to do my best to make him feel extra safe and secure, to help him realize that, although bad things happen, he doesn't need to become as tough as a teenager to deal with them.