We managed to have school four of the five days this week, and actually learned a bit of English and Math and cooking and about our community (post office! changing money!)
J. has started to use some English around the house, including polite words, like “Excuse me,” “thank you,” and “you’re welcome.” He’s even copying terms of endearment “sweetie;” “love” and some of the language we use in phone calls–“sorry” and “I love you too.” He’s mostly using them with the dog, but he seems to like them.
He makes gagging noises when Craig and I hug goodbye in the morning, but he sometimes wants a hug of his own.
So all that’s major progress.
But then, when he got angry about school and an art project not working out on Thursday, he got physically violent with me–at one point getting in a few good kicks, and hard punches to both my head and shoulder.
I didn’t even realize how angry I was until yesterday. I snapped at him for a (for him) relatively minor bit of disrespect, and that led to an uncomfortable evening for all of us. Tried to explain that my anger with him was not really about the disrespect (though I’m not thrilled with that), but about the earlier incident, but that didn’t help much.
Not sure how we’re doing now, but hopefully we can work through our anger issues and get back to making progress on being a family.