A few weeks ago Karina’s teachers started mentioning that she was hitting and or pushing other children in class. We would remind her to keep her hands to herself and send her back the next day. However, after it became apparent that things weren’t getting better, and after having to sign the incident book because Karina pushed someone who fell into a table, some action was needed, so Karina became the proud owner of her very own behavior chart. There were some good days and some bad days and then there was a really bad day when she earned herself two red faces for the day. I didn’t even know this was an option but things really hadn’t gone well that day apparently and I had to sign the incident book again. As I was signing the book the teacher said that there was a note in Karina’s journal about a parent conference and if I could confirm that we could attend. I am pretty sure I cried that afternoon.

I know that we have a wonderful daughter and it hurt to think we have placed her in a situation that is so foreign to her that it is preventing others from seeing all of the good qualities we love about her. I confirmed our attendance for the following week and got sad thinking about what could possibly happen at the upcoming conference. Would they tell us they just aren’t able to handle a kid that can’t yet speak Spanish? Would they give us a warning about what would happen if Karina hit again? Would they ask Karina to leave their program? It was pretty stressful to think about and it just happened to be while there was also stress about Karina’s birthday party.

Knowing how emotional it was to just think about the conference and the problems Karina has had keeping her hands to herself, I thought it was probably in our best interests to ask a friend to come along to translate during our meeting, even if it meant they would probably see me get upset. My friend confirmed he would be there and we were all set.

Two days before the conference, and 6 days after receiving the notice, Karina and I were playing at the playground and there were some other moms from Karina’s class there. They always kindly ask how she is adapting and I was explaining about her behavior chart and how things had gotten to the point that the teacher requested a conference. The mom then said, “Me, too. And his mom has one as well”, she said pointing to the other mom. “I wondered what my son had done but the other mom just told me everyone has a scheduled conference coming up”. WHAT?!?!?!

So all this worrying I had been doing, come to find out, was in vain. We weren’t being singled out, we were being treated like everyone else and were to be given the results from the teacher’s evaluation for Karina. In fact, I think we were the first conference she scheduled in this series of meetings.

So Thursday came and Chris and I headed to Karina’s school for our conference, just with a much better outlook on things. My friend still joined us just to speed the process up because even though I understood everything, he was faster at translating it all for Chris. The teacher went over Karina’s results from the observations she had made, we asked a few questions about some miscellaneous topics and we brought up the hitting but it wasn’t a big focus of our time at all. We surprised Karina by greeting her while she was playing outside, interestingly enough while she was trying to physically convince a boy that she should be occupying the same space he was, and we all went out to lunch with my friend. Not a bad day at all after all. And to top it off, Karina brought home an excellent behavior chart for the week!