Max's class at school was studying insects way back at the beginning of the year. At that point his teacher told the kids to look for bugs and bring cool ones in.
So several weeks ago when Max found a cool bug he and Kris caught it and he insisted on bringing it to school. I told his teacher that he had a bug and she said "Of course he does!! The kids won't stop bringing them!"
So I guess the bug pulled some hijinks in the classroom that day. He escaped from his little jar and crawled and flew around the room and Max and friends got in trouble taking too long capturing him before lunch.
After the bug's second day in his jar I said it was time for him to go free. I forced Max to take his jar outside so he could go free. There were many tears and sad statements made. The bug was his BEST FRIEND! This was the ONLY TIME I've EVER let him keep a bug!! He LOVES THAT BUG!
But finally I convinced Max that buggy needed his freedom. Buggy hung out in his jar for the evening (happily for Max) and then left for the wild.
It's quite the nature story. Nature Max loves nature.
A few weeks ago we had some crazy behavior going on with Max at school. He was just getting used to his new class, and he has a friend in there that's a little nutty. This little boy is silly, physically a little out of control and just doesn't know when to stop. And all my little guy needs is a little encouragement to be too too silly. At school they have a behavior feedback system that works out pretty well. It's based on colors. If a kid's color card is blue by the end of the day that means that they had an excellent behavior day. If it gets switched to green, it means good. Orange is not so good, yellow the next, and red is NOT good at all. It is nice to have some sort of feedback from school so I can know what's going on--or at least have a hint of what might be going on. He was all blue for a long time, then suddenly we started seeing yellows and oranges and not many blues at all. And we knew he could do better. So we had lots of talks about times when it's ok to be silly and times to be serious. We also talked about not letting other people encourage him to do things that would get him in trouble. All important lessons for life, I'm sure this is just the beginning of trying to teach these lessons. Then to top it off we gave him an incentive program. If he could get be blue every day for 5 or 6 days in a row (I can't remember which) he got an awesome prize. It took a couple of false starts, but he totally earned it and we were proud. We asked him how he got blue one day and he told us that he just did his best to ignore anybody that tried to distract him by being silly. Good job Max!!
So he got a habitat for his hexbug as his prize. And, lucky for him he got an extra hexbug along with it. Have youguys seen these Hexbugs? We got ours at Target. They're these cute teeny robots that look a lot like little bugs and speed around the floor super fast. They're really fun to watch but it's really hard not too lose them under the furniture. Unless you have a habitat. See how blurry they are in the picture? Told you they were fast. Anyway, he loved the prize and hopefully felt fulfilled for doing such a good job behaving. And generally since then he's been quite good, even though we haven't given him too many more material incentives.
He's so cute with the bugs that I had to take a video the other day when Kris was out of town and Max was supposed to be eating dinner. It's pretty cute. Enjoy if you'd like.
