One Day At a Time

Things were better yesterday with Squeaker apart from having to go pick her up (right after I had put the littles down for a nap) because she "missed the bus". I had halfway expected her to miss it because there was a soccer meeting she wanted to go to after school even though I told her to come straight home.

I had a brief talk with her this morning about how she has been acting the past few weeks and that things needed to change including the way I was reacting to it. She didn't disagree when I suggested that visiting her sister and sister's dad was causing an internal struggle with loyalties. She has not been thinking of us as family because she still wants them and she is a very black-and-white thinker. I told her that her orginal family can still be family as is her adoptive family. She nodded hesitantly so I'm not sure what she's getting from that.

Anyway, we're on a day-by-day system now wherein she has no privileges whatsoever and has to earn them for the next day. Hoping this will work better than the loss of privileges system which just makes her mad and gives no incentive to stop. She can easily turn one day of lost privileges into two weeks of wrath and hell. She has agreed to the earning privileges method and still wants to be able to go to Disneyland with her sister next month so I'm hoping for positive results at least for the next few weeks.