Grandma in Shining Armor rides in...

Poor Karen. She called on Monday to tell me she had decided to find a different day care for Seth. She has not been happy with them for the last several weeks. There are a number of reasons why. One of them is that he is an older 4 yr old still in a Jr Pre-K class. He is larger and more mature than every child in the class. They would not move him up to the regular pre-K program because he will not be starting kindergarten this year since his birthday is Sept 11 and past the cut off date. Their reasoning is that the other kids will move on to kindergarten and he will be left behind. Karen does not think it is a valid argument and neither do I. He is bored in the class he is in and needs to be doing more advanced work. Because of his boredom, he was getting into trouble quite often. They have accused him of using ugly language and being disrespectful. If he is using ugly language, he learned it from the other children because he has not heard it from any of us. The teachers, of course, tell Karen they have never heard any of the other children use it. They have started telling him he is a bad boy. I was livid. You tell a child that their actions are inappropriate or that they need to use nice words. You steer them to an activity to take their mind of what they were doing before. You never tell a child they are bad. They will begin to believe it. In addition, apparently one or more of the children told Seth that when his mommy gets married, his new Daddy will spank him all the time because he is bad. Poor baby was extremely upset about that one. Karen and Joe sat him down and assured him that Joe would not spank him all the time and that he is not a bad boy.

My sister in law agreed to start watching him on Monday but could not start any earlier because of a previous commitment. She said she would watch him as long as Karen needed to find a better place for him. I thought it was a good plan. However, on Wednesday morning, Karen called in tears and told me about another incident that apparently happened on Tuesday involving another child and Seth. She has no more sick days or personal time left since she had her gall bladder surgery a couple of months ago and couldn’t leave work without losing pay. I left work immediately and went to get him. He was thrilled to see me and very excited about leaving. This actually made me sad because I always had a difficult time getting him to leave on previous visits because he was having so much fun. I have had him with me yesterday and today and we have had a great time. He has been respectful of me. He has been a normal 4 year old little boy. We went to the park. We went shopping. We saw Horton hears a Hoo. We baked cookies. We played Memory. We have colored more pictures than I have colored in many, many years. I am exhausted. LOL I have told him all through that he is such a good boy and that I am proud of his manners and proud that he has been so helpful and proud that he is such a special little boy.