Did you ever hold your breath, waiting for something unpleasant to happen, on high alert mode. And then nothing happens for a while and you start to relax a little. And still nothing happens. You think that maybe you were just oversensitive and that the event may not come. You let out your breath and go on with life........and....then it comes, BAM!  Why is it so much worse?
      For weeks I hesitated to look at the caller ID in case it might be the school number.  I avoided eye contact with the aid after school, hoping he didn't have a complaint or note to pass on.  Each day and week that nothing happened;which means things were going relatively smoothly, I relax more. I should know from experience that it's not going to last, but I revel in the good days.... until. BAM! Out of nowhere.  No warning that things are different. Ben came home the previous day and worked homework diligently for hours. We didn't know that he had been out of the regular class for the last three periods. But then, the next day, we got a note. So, not only had he gotten in a boy's face after lunch the first day, Ben had been warning a kid in homeroom that he better not mess with him. He admitted that the boy had not recently done anything, but he"couldn't stand it anymore". So the upshot was that he spent the entire day in "academic village"...at least it's not ISS.
And thus begins the long  haul to claw our way back out of the hole...the cycle of giving consequences, Ben being so preoccupied with said consequence that he is in a bad mood, getting in trouble because he is in a bad mood, giving consequences for getting in trouble, etc.  And the worse part is we don't know what started this.  He wasn't sick, or tired, or bothered in any way that we know of.  Something just unnerved him enough to make the sight of certain kids maddening to him.  Make him think about and dwell on something these kids did in the past, maybe a year ago.
In true Ben fashion, he admitted to threatening the one boy with throwing him out of school "when I become class president". We had to hide our smiles while Matt explained that Ben was not going tobe class president, because you have to get along with kids to get elected, plus, class president doesn't carry that power. I guess it was the only perceived power he might have to rid himself of his nemises.
But today we go back to the holding our breath......