::bugs::

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.

::chores::

For the last long time I've been thinking that it would be a good idea to formalize Max's chores. He didn't have many. Basically we had him feeding the dog and that was about it. We were supposed to be paying him a quarter every time he did it, but often I would forget to pay him and he'd forget to remind me. So then after weeks he'd be like "HEY! Where are all my quarters?"
And the only thing he could really do with his quarters was buy gum or something like that. He didn't really make enough to ever save for something more substantial, which I think was a little frustrating.

So. Not to ramble any more, but since we're in our new place, finally pretty settled in, we thought it was time to come up with a better system.
We assigned him five chores to start with, and I made a chart for the week. If he finished all his chores every day that week he gets a prize. Some of the prizes are small, some big. Mostly they're just stuff I would've gotten for him anyway. This week we used our family outing to see UP as his prize for last week. That worked out well.

He's been doing great! I think it helps to have the visual representation of his progress right there on the fridge, and the prize is really motivating.

And next post I'll tell you all about his first prize, it was very exciting.

Any suggestions of other chores we could add onto his chart? It's hard for me to think of things he can do that don't just end up slowing me down. Give me some ideas!