School

We have been so proud of Dima starting school.  I could not imagine how overwhelming it must be for him to start a totally new school that is really big.  We were a little afraid that he would not want to get up in the morning and give us a hard time about going to school, but he's been really good.  It helped having 2hr snow delays his first two days of school. They still had all the classes but were shortened.  His first full day of school was yesterday. When I picked him up, he was in a good mood.  I received a phone call earlier from his English as a Second Language teacher.  She had to talk to me about Dima's mood.  He is giving her the cold shoulder and not being very nice to her.  We are trying to work things out as to why he is acting like this.  My guess is that he doesn't like to have a class by himself.  His second period he is with her for English.  He will not open up to her so she is starting with the basics.  I am sure he is not happy and feels like she is teaching him things he already knows.  We need to work on him opening up to her to prove he has been learning English and to show her respect.  I am hoping overtime he will start to trust her and that maybe Liliya can help him as well. 

Dima is showing that he does not want to just sit in class and learn English.  He wants to participate by doing work.  It will be a while until he gets up enough courage to talk.  He says he can understand a good bit, but  can't express himself yet in English.  This is not bad considering he's only been here for 3 weeks! His big thing he will need to work on is his patience.  He gets extremely upset if he can not doing something correctly.  He is his own worst critic.  Dusty and I are trying to get him to relax and not be so hard on himself.  We are not sure if this is the way he always has been or if he feels pressure to do well to make us happy.  This is something that is going to take a long time to work on.  We need to continue to be patient.  I lost my patience with him for the first time the other night after he was refusing to work on his hand writing.  He is very impatient and not confident in his writing and scribbles fast.  I got upset with him after he got frustrated and scribbled all over a piece of paper and told him sternly he had to try.  He was taken back of how upset I got at him and he said "Sorry Mama".  It was the first time I had yelled at him and the first time I saw him respond with emotion.  I think it was a good sign to see he is opening up more about his emotions.  When he was here during the hosting program, he gave me the silent treatment for hours one time so we are improving!

Last night I wanted him to relax and forget about school for a while.  I asked him if he wanted to go cross country skiing.  He got very excited when I asked him.  When we got to where we ski and I tried to explain as best as I could what to do.  He was having a really hard time trying to keep his skis going horizontally.  He started getting very frustrated.  I thought.....here we go again, he is going to want to give up.  I used this as a lesson to try and teach him that just because something is challenging at first, you need to keep trying.  He is very talented and can usually pick things up quickly. This is something that was not going to come easy to him. He continued to mumble in Russian but he kept going.  I tried to joke around with him and he would give a little smile every once in a while. He kept falling and his hands were getting cold so we called it a night.  I asked him if he wanted to go another day and he said no.  I am hoping after some time away from it we will go again.  Hopefully he will see some improvement and gain some confidence.

He was so tired from his first full day of school and skiing that he actually went to bed at 8pm! He woke up on his own this morning.  He got himself dressed, made his bed and ate breakfast by the time I was finished with my shower!