I totally missed your post from 12:22.  I saw "meeting" in your last post and read back to see what you meant and realized I missed a whole post.

 

Okay, I'm not great at discipline which is why Chane is a PITA.  However, I'm learning about consistency from his therapist.  I know it's hard but I bet there are workshops and other ideas for daycare providers on discipline.  There's no way teachers in school would let kids break their rules without consequences.  Could you do a simple "three strike" or "red light" system like they do in schools.  It would be harder with different age groups but maybe different age groups could have different consequences.  I know B's and C's classes have always had class rewards for good weeks (if more than a few kids were misbehaving, the whole class would lose their sticker so when they had a certain # of stickers, they had a treat).  And for Scouts I use marbles - each kid gets a marble and if they are warned about something (mostly being disrespectful when other kids are talking) they get one warning and the next time they lose their marble.  They get a treat when they fill a jar with marbles - they peer pressure each other not to lose the marbles.  The candy campfire was a marble treat.  Because Chane is "special" and manages to go beyond losing his marble, we also have a special system in place with exactly what to do next.  That is because he lost it one week and I didn't know what to do next.  Rocky told me to sit down and figure out exactly what can happen and what to do about it. So now if he loses his marble, I leave the den with another parent and go down to get Mike, the Cubmaster.  He will lead Chane up three floors to Scott's den, where he'll have to sit and observe boring stuff with the big kids.  Mike is involved because I'm afraid Chane will go as far as throwing a screaming fit with just me.  You wouldn't have to do exactly what I do but it sounds like the kids' lack of respect for your rules is driving you crazy so maybe if you took an hour and went to dinner or something somewhere by yourself with a notebook and just thought it all through, you could come up with some plans?  I always had systems before but never real plans for a lot of the things  Chane does.  It really does help.  Last night because I knew how badly he was wanting to do the campfire thing, I was able to just use a simple "three strikes" with him because I had a big enough motivator but that only works with him if there's something he wants badly enough.  Which I also plan to bring up to Rocky - if he truly can't control his behavior sometimes, how come if he wants something badly enough he can?  Although there have been many times when he lost something he wanted badly so maybe that's not true but it does seem like if there's something really good I ahve more of a chance of "three strikes" working.

 

Just a suggestion.  Between Chane and Scouts I've had to do some thinking lately and I think that even though you can't stop other people's kids from being annoying, you can definitely expect them to follow house rules.  It would be different if they were your kids' friends - you wouldn't have them much and you could stop inviting them if they misbehave.  But you are running a business and it would drive me nuts if I had to deal with annoyingness AND ruining things.  Of course they will ruin some things, that's to be expected, but throwing a ball in the house after you tell them not to is too  much.

 

Oh man my dad gave Chane his first joke book so he is reading jokes out loud to me but then he doesn't even get them so he has to say "what does that mean?"  I tried to explain that the job of a comedian is to gauge his audience and figure out if jokes are funny first but he just keeps reading one after the other.  I already have Braeden doing that although his are finally mostly funny since he's older - man!

 

I need to go have a thinking session myself.  Gotta figure out when we'll do our Christmas stuff.  I think we're going to have a "Making Christmas part II" weekend this weekend.  Now that we are busy so many nights I feel like we have to make time for Christmas stuff.  I like that we do a whole season of stuff and not just a couple of days.  I think that's why the kids have been so angelic on Christmas Day the last 4 Christmasses - because the gifts aren't the biggest part of their Christmas.  So I need to fit it all in!  At least the kid stuff!  And the decorating, especially outside, since that's more for them too.