Thursday, December 28, 2006

Rude Boy!

We've been having some issues with Josey either totally ignoring people when he's spoken to, or else being extremely rude. I first noticed that he was acting funny when we were at the grocery store a couple of weeks ago. Normally he'll say hi and wave to everyone he sees, or else give a big smile, but when someone talked to him, he got a disturbed "Who the heck is this stranger" look and walked away really fast. Not such a big deal, but at Carlingwood last week a lady came up to us and was talking to Roanen (who is now Mr Happy in public), then noticed Josey was behind him in the stroller. When she talked to him, he gave her a really nasty (not even cute nasty) look, disgusted curled lip and all, and snarled at her. Afterwards, when we told him that he should be nice and smile at people, he said "No - I make my angry face!" Later on he said he made his angry face because "People were touching my brother". As if this wasn't bad enough, he was nasty to my grandmother when she came to visit, and slammed the door at her, then refused to talk to her. This happened a couple of times when she came over, including an incident where he told her to go away really rudely. Needless to say she was devastated, and stopped coming over for a couple of days because she was upset about it. (As an aside, Roanen was making up for it by climbing up on her and hugging her really sweetly whenever she came over) We ended up having a big talk with him about how he needed to be nice to people, and especially Mom because she was very sad about how he was treating her, and he went over to her house and hugged her and told her he loved her. Since then, he's been trying really hard to be nice to people, and is even going to meet Daddy at the door, which he hasn't done in a while. When I was talking to him about starting his skating lessons, he asked who was going to help him learn to skate, then said "I not going to be shy with those ladies, and I not going to be angry with them", so maybe he really is learning something.
On the topic of respect, Josey has also surprised us by teaching himself to shake hands when meeting someone. I think he really pays attention to the fact that Russ shakes hands, so he's been doing it too. At Russ' sister's place this weekend, I asked him to say hi to his cousin Ryan and he said hi, then picked up his hand off a chair and shook it. Cute!

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