Even more improvement

I had posted about Brendan and the constant misbehavior in school and his appalling and drama king behavior at home. I'm very happy to report, and hope I'm not jinxing it, that for 7 consecutive school days that he hasn't gotten into any trouble. The kids will get Xs for misbehavior with 3 Xs generating some sort of punishment and he's gone all 7 days without 1 X. This is basically a record for him for the whole school year. I'm not sure if it's a result of the numerous discussions we've had about his behavior or the Nintendo DS bribe I dangled in front of him if he didn't get into any more trouble before school ends (and I wasn't even expecting him to get no Xs, I'd only said no more punishment homework, detentions or trips to the principal's office). I'm thinking it's more of the bribe since he also said to me yesterday, "If I don't get any more Xs this week, will you take me to see Speed Racer on Saturday?". So he finally seems to be able to get the idea of good behavior = good consequences.

I'm not sure if I want his behavior to be dependent upon bribes, um incentives, but negative consequences definitely wasn't working. I'm also hoping that as he gets into the habit of behaving that maybe the good behavior will be come more naturally. On the homefront there's been less success, but I've also been working hard with the drama behavior and trying to stop it as soon as it starts before he can get into a bad jag. And I've been pretty zero tolerance on the lack of respect. But this has been a huge improvement.

And on another note, now we're waiting on the RSVPs to his birthday party to which his whole class was invited. This is the first real kids party he's had and I'm hoping it goes well (there's a whole other story involved in getting this party off the ground, but that's for another post).