SOS (Save my Sanity)

First off, thank you all for your prayers for The Brit's safe return.  He is home, still a little jet lagged, but thankfully home.

Next up, huge thanks to Meg and Ruth for their insight with my eldest son and the mission trip.  I will be versing the other three adult leaders for this trip prior to it happening and setting up some boundaries for them to be aware of with the son and myself.  The experience you ladies have in the field, from two totally different perspectives, I may add, help me more than you know.

Now, I need more help as I am quickly running out of ideas and maybe there just aren't any other ideas.  Maybe what we are doing is just what we should do and we simply have to hope that one day things sink in with the oldest child.  Maybe this is just simple teenage rebellion and he is perfectly normal.  The problem is that with an ADHD child who is adopted is that I don't think I ever really know where the issues are stemming from.

The eldest child has been challenging the entire five years we've had him, so though there are new challenges, the fact that he is challenging is not new.  He is an honor roll student...until the last two marking periods when he has suddenly decided to get interim reports and pull a few C's on his report card.  For us, the fact that he has made the honor roll more often than not, tells us he is more than capable of doing it.  The incentive that has been kicked into place is that until his grades are up, he doesn't get his PSP (play station portable for those of you not in the know).  He has been without this video device since before Christmas and his latest report card also showed two C's.  He never has homework and per the teachers, they don't really give out homework, but more classwork.  We have been over with this child, that sometimes homework doesn't specifically have to be something that is assigned at home, but maybe a test he needs to study for.  The C's also come from not completing class work.  The PSP has been our best incentive as he seems to care about little else other than his video games.  We tried not giving an allowance and he couldn't have cared less about that, so that was a strike out.

The next issue we are dealing with are chores.  The basic chores the kids have each week is trash and cat litter, on Mondays and Wednesdays.  When we started this, Little Brother had litter, which he did fairly well and Oldest Son had trash, which he rarely did the way he was supposed to (not taking it to the curb, etc, so it didn't get picked up).  After far too long of trying to deal with the trash issue, we traded them chores, stating to Oldest Son that as he couldn't handle doing trash that he needed to have a go at litter.

Well, he has done no better with litter.  Again, constant battles for the job to get done correctly or better yet, at all.  Tonight he was caught pouring new litter on top of the old litter without ever dipping it.  At my wit's end with all this, I grounded him for a week.

The second chore he has, he just got when he turned 13 as there are things I think he needs to learn to do in order to prepare him for adulthood.  His chore is folding his laundry and putting it away.  I collect it, wash it and lay his items on his bed once they are clean.  We went over the expectations with this, which resulted in him throwing his clean clothes either A) back in the laundry basket or on the floor of his closet.  So The Brit and I picked our strategy that whatever was not put away properly, we would take and eventually he would realize he was running out of clothes.  In just three weeks, we had accumulated enough clothing to make about a yard high pile of clothing on the floor of my closet.  When he finally got his clothes back, I sat on his bed and chatted with him while he hung them all up, which took him well over an hour.  He is well versed in telling us what we want to hear, admitting that it was stupid for him to make all this work for himself when it would have only taken him a few minutes twice a week to put them away properly.

A week later, he is again depositing clothing on the floor or in the hamper when they are clean.  The new rule is that now, he doesn't get them back. They are put aside for when Little Brother gets older.

When asked why he doesn't do the jobs properly his response is always "Well, I don't like doing X."  We then explain to him that this is life and that given our choice, neither of us would work, or clean or cook, but there are just things we are required to do.

Where are we going wrong?  Should we be doing something different?  Why doesn't he learn these basic things that he has been in trouble for again and again and again?  Are we setting our expectations too high?  I don't think so personally as these are very basic chores he has.  I'm losing my mind with all of this and it just seems like there should be a light at the end of the tunnel somewhere.