Kid updates and spring vacation

I was surprised it's been so long since I've posted. We're half way through spring break....nothing in particular on our agenda this week other than seeing family, spring cleaning, and a chance to recover from work for a few days. My Aunt Diane was in Kentucky for two weeks and it was the first time she'd seen Luke in 3 years or met Raha or Aaron. Luke had an adventure with her at the horse park and she and mom painted my kitchen an (accidentally bright) gold color. Now Rich's mom is in town for the rest of week.

A tough part of the week has been Raha. He had a huge tantrum on Tuesday. After a great weekend, he was really cranky and tired on Monday. Because of rudeness he lost TV time on Tuesday and blew up. He stormed out of the house - the plan is for him to get out of the house if he's going to lose his temper - but then came back in, broke the doggie gate to his room, broke a window, then went back outside to knock over the garbage cans and trash the mailbox. Eventually he walked it off in the neighborhood and his therapist and case worker came out to the house for an emergency session. Major consequences for the behavior of course, and it's alarming that he's tried out property destruction, which is a new behavior. It's really frustrating because he's gone 3 months without a tantrum and I didn't think he's up the ante like this.

Aaron's been very high maintenance. Barbara was worried tonight about how fussy he was and wondered if he was sick again. He was sobbing from his crib about "owie knee!" I took a bandaid downstairs and he told me the bandaid would help him feel better. Then he decided that he'd rather have the bandaid on his finger, and promptly went to sleep. Nope, not sick.

Luke, fortunately, is delightful. Someone needs to be! We're working much more systematically on reading, thanks to Diane's advice - a combination of Dulce sight words, word families, writing personal stories, and reading simple books. He's thrilled that he has two little books he can read all by himself, "Monkey Flies a Kite," and "Dinah Dinosaur."