Friday 25 April 2008

Thursday 24th April 08

A really good day, starting off with our son saying that he wanted to talk about his behaviour yesterday. We agreed to have a family meeting after lunch. So a good morning, even though it was raining, we enjoyed the fact that the school was closed because of the NUT strike and had some fun times.

So after lunch we all four of us sat down but one child got either bored or upset by the content of the conversation, and the other had an anger outburst as he didn't like what he was hearing back from the grown-ups. He did calm down again though, and I introduced him to the 'talking stick' concept, where in a group situation, whoever holds the stick can talk, and others do not interupt. He loved this as we practised 'active listening' and he didn't interupt us either when the time came for us to air our feelings. We ended up by briefly looking through the parenting class manual so he could see some of the work we'd been having to do. We didn't do any more than that, although we want to try setting some family rules again (we did try but it didn't get very far!) Right at the end, the other child came back in and we had a 'proper' family meeting and all was well.

So, happy family members today. The boys had several visitors during the afternoon as school was closed.

I went for a Green Festival meeting in the evening but as Baz and Rob couldn't make it, I didn't go into Space 109 but waited outside and fielded all-comers and we went to the Spread Eagle for a chat/meeting/drink. Good to do this and it was a productive meeting.

No comments: