Haven’t been around. I hope everyone is doing as well as possible! I can’t really go back 200 posts to catch up.

Me, well, I’ve been up and down. Moving is stressful. We’re completely moving in this weekend. I did manage to get the water company on the phone in a respectable amount of time and get someone who was actually polite, which is a nice change. Our water company is trash. Honestly you can’t even trust the water on any given day is safe to drink. They are forever issuing boil water warnings. It’s a corrupt company. They just recently hired a brand new head so hopefully he’ll be able to turn things around.

Today was just a bad day with my son. I got a message from his teacher that he hasn’t been attending all his online classes. For instance, today he left at 10am and never went back. I had let him be fully remote about a month ago. Turns out, he’s been lying to my mom about being done with class, and lying about the system “glitching” and not letting him sign in. I am not even mad, just disappointed and feeling hopeless. I noticed that he’s been lying more frequently but it has only been about little things, like eating food in his room, or so I thought. To pull off a scam like this is unacceptable. He even tried to lie after admitting to the lie once I asked him about a specific aspect. It’s terrible. I talked it over with him and he claims he doesnt mean to, he just does and then doesn’t take it back. I don’t know. He is extremely impulsive. I know that some things he does, such as mocking us (like mimicking when we tell him not to do something) is honestly just an impulse and he doesn’t think about it before he does it.

I’ve tried and failed twice now to get an appointment for family therapy. On Monday I am going to call every single day until the front desk staff finally stops ****ing around and gets the message to the right people. We need help desperately. He needs help to learn to tame his impulsivity.

I do have one idea, the tried and true star chart. But we have to start from scratch. I need to give him just three or four things to work on and build from there.I’m thinking be respectful, be truthful, and two basic chores - cleaning up after himself in the bathroom and keeping clothes off his bedroom floor. It seems like he should be able to handle so much more at ten but he’s not built like other kids. I can’t just tell him to clean his room, I need to spell every step out for him or he will forget.

I hope I can stick to this. I figure if he earns his stars for four out of seven days he can earn a treat. We’ll come up with some age appropriate treats. I know he’ll jump at the chance to earn an App Store gift card or extra time on his iPad. God I hope this helps!