Thursday, October 26, 2006

Raising the bar

Zoey's been home about 3 weeks now. It's been pretty smooth sailing, I must say. We had an "episode" last night which seemed to be heading in a unfortunate direction. Zoey put up a fight over doing the dishes which resulted in her loosing her stereo and being assigned more sentences to write - after saying I could "F off" Sunday evening, she needs to write 5 pages of "Disrespect will get me nowhere."

I also had to lock her glasses up in my desk drawer because she was throwing them and threatening to break them. Interestingly, I have a destruction of property rule that didn't include eye glasses until last night. LOL I quickly thought up a consequence, necessity being the mother of invention and all. Deliberate destruction of property costs twice the replacement value, so I guess glasses would be a couple hundred dollars for her to replace. I could have my house sparkling! LOL I wouldn't have to clean a thing myself for a couple of months! hehehe

She screamed at me, pulled some of the usual punches in an attempt to make me feel as out of control as she does. Finally, I just looked her in the eye and said "in about 30 seconds, you're going to be screaming at yourself because I refuse to be talked to in this way and I am not going to sit here and take this." Then I got up and calmly walked away. She sat there and cried, which is an improvement over her following me around the house to continue her verbal assaults, what she generally does. After a few minutes, she calmed down and completed half the dishes - vowing to finish the rest today, which she did. I don't like making that kind of compromise, but sometimes I gotta do what works and if I can avoid pushing her beyond her limit, I will.

She had no privileges last night and before bed she read to me. I bought the girls a 'Precious Moments' book of prayers and little inspirational stories last Easter, I chose that book for her to read. This regression strategy is really working well. We encourage reading simpler stories, playing with dolls, anything that helps regress her and get her back to earlier developmental stages. I haven't even heard her talk about boys in about a week! Hooray she's playing with dolls instead!

As she does better and we are seeing that, yes, she can control herself, we're gently raising the bar. I push a little harder when I can and she's allowed a bad day here and there, she is afterall a 15 year old and I would want the same allowance for messing up on days that I'm in a pissy mood. But, overall, she seems to be doing very well and has been more receptive than ever to changing her self-destructive ways. It's good and I'm enjoying every minute of it!

Saturday, October 07, 2006

Kicking Zoey out of MySpace!

Welcome to my new blog! I had been sharing this story on my MySpace, but I decided to let MySpace be for me, as it is called MySpace. LOL Also, I don't think my friends there always know what to say to the far out things that go on in my daily life now! Anyone wanting to follow this adventure can do so here from now on, while I save MySpace for goofing off with my friends. I'll move my blog posts over here soon. Thanks for stopping by!