I am typing this blog post on a brandy new laptop that Alan got me for my birthday! Yay!! This one even has a delete key and a caps lock, unlike my other laptop. :)

We are in the final week before Lex’s First Lego League presentation on Sunday. During the final week there are always extra optional practices that the kids can attend to finish up missions and projects. Lex has been excited for FLL this year, but in a somewhat different way than last year. He has been spending most of the practices working on the project, which is good, but I’ve started questioning why he isn’t working on the missions. I thought maybe he was focused on the project because I volunteered to run the project this year and he obviously hears a lot about it at home. :) Tonight he said he wanted to go to the practice, but at the last minute he backed out. We ended up in a discussion about why he had to go (the coach was waiting for him!) and why he didn’t want to go. He started with excuses about being too tired and just not wanting to, but eventually he said that the missions were just too hard this year and he didn’t know how to do them and he was bored at the practices. He was upset that the competition is less than a week away and he doesn’t have a mission and it’s too late to start one and they are all too hard anyway.

This is EXACTLY what we are working on with him and his anxiety these days! He is so smart and things generally come easily to him, so when they don’t he doesn’t really know what to do. We are working on strategies to help him in those situations because his current strategy is to shut-down, avoid, and cry. Exactly what he was doing tonight!

I was debating about letting him skip the practice (it’s optional anyway), but when the real problem came out I knew we couldn’t skip it! He followed me to the car, angrily, and sulked on the drive there. I asked him to think about some of the strategies he has been learning about lately and he grumpily did. When we got there he was in a slightly better frame of mind. I chatted with the coach a bit, explained the situation (and Lex’s anxiety) and the coach, of course, is great! He had a mission in mind that one of the other students was struggling with and he got Lex right involved. I hung around for a little while, then checked in with Lex before leaving. He was working on a mission, happily, and decided he wanted to stay until the end. When he got home he was really happy with the progress he had made and eager to go back tomorrow to keep working on it. Score!!

Sometimes it’s hard to know what is the right thing to do, when to push and when to back off, but tonight I got lucky and made all the right choices. Anxiety faced and overcome! He was and proud. So was I!