....I tricked him into liking school again

 Today is election day, so Nixon had no school. After yesterday's behavior fiasco, I think we both needed a good day together. Today was that day.

    We spent a couple hours at the mall. Our first stop was the restroom....because, pee. Then we wondered around and eventually stopped for food. The service was incredibly slow and apparently 2 servers didn't want our table. I mean, one came to get our drink order, then didn't return with them. Another server came over to get our food order and asked about our drinks...which we'd already ordered. Server A brought over drinks and that was the last we saw her. Server B brought over creamers for my coffee. We waited well over 30 minutes for our food. The entire time, Nixon was great! He quietly played some games on the sheet they gave them, we played some together and he sipped on his milkshake.
   We finally got our food and Nixon was pretty well spent by that point. He ate a little and within 15 minutes of our food arriving, we were done and gone. We took most of the food to go.

    Our next stop was the book store.
    Can I just say I love that my kid enjoys books?! I'm not sure what I'd do without books. And I love that Nixon is catching on to that. (His class has a Pizza Hut reward for reading books. It's 5 books for the month, read to or the kids reading, and they earn a free personal pan pizza. He got the Monday and already we've read 3 books! We're huge book-nerds, all of us!)
   Nixon chose 4 books, one was a puzzle boxed set. He'll earn one book each day for the rest of this week. I love that he wants to earn books.....as rewards!

    On the drive home from the mall, Nixon says he wants to "quit school". Most parents would tell a child that's not allowed.
    I'm not most parents.
    We talked about it. I started by asking him what he didn't like (recess ends, not enough fun stuff, boring work). That wasn't working it was just reminding him of what he didn't like.
    I changed tactics.
    I asked him different questions about what he likes about school. But I disguised it as things he "didn't hate". "Art, computer lab, gym, music" were the top list of things he came up with. I then asked him if he'd miss those things, since he was quitting school and all. He says "Well, maybe I should go back. (new student) is just starting to like class, I can help make her laugh."
    That's my boy!