Don't call Child Protective Services!

You may recall from the beginning of the school year that Reed has a behavior chart in his classroom with different colors that correspond to behavior. Green is good, yellow is a warning, blue means you miss recess and red (supposedly) means you have to call your mom! Well, I didn't get a phone call, but Reed was on red for the first time last week. He's on green about 80% of the time and usually has one yellow per week. He'd already been on blue one day last week and it had been too cold for the kids to play outside. Pent-up energy? I don't know. But in Reed's words, "I skipped yellow, Mom, and went straight to blue and then to red."

Well, Tim & I had a heart-to-heart with Reed and told him that it was not okay to be on red and since he was, he would have to lose his TV time for the evening and go play in his room by himself. We talked to him about listening to his teacher and he seemed remorseful. He wrote a letter of apology to his teacher and was going to verbally tell her he was sorry the next day.

Well, the next day rolled around and he did all those things and stayed on green the whole day. However, at his after-school care, he got a little active and while sliding down the length of a table, managed to get his head stuck between two of them and while extracting it, hit the side of his head on the edge of the table.

This was the result. This picture was taken today, almost a week later, so it looked much worse back then.

So when, two days after he had been on red at school for bad behavior, I sent him to school with a black eye, I was quite concerned that there would be reports that we had beaten our child. I didn't, I swear. That's my story and I'm stickin' to it.