He fooled them again

Every year we go through the same thing with Zvi. He hates going to school. This started the first time he started going to school when he was in pre-Nursery in Yeshivat Rambam in Baltimore and continued in TA in Nursery, Kindergarten and 1st grade and has picked up with a vengeance here. I've had to physically force him onto the bus in the morning and he's gone on literally kicking and screaming. Not surprisingly, we got a phone call at 11 this morning from the school that Zvi is sick and needs to come home. Shira told them that he didn't want to go to school and he does this all the time but they insisted that he had bad diarrhea and he had to come home.

We were in Petach Tikva getting a new freezer for yom tov (maybe Shira will blog about that later) so Shira said we'd be there in an hour. Then we got nervous trying to figure out how the teacher knew what was wrong and that maybe he'd had an accident. We got to school and we saw the principal who pointed out Zvi's teacher so we talked to her. She told us that Zvi was doing well despite not understanding a word she said but that he was really sick today. We told her that he's a good faker but she insisted he was really sick because he kept leaving class to go to the bathroom and he was embarrassed to tell her what was wrong. We went to Zvi and congratulated him on faking them out and he laughed. He said he only told them his stomach hurt and he claimed it really did. We tried convincing him to stay in school but he really wanted to come home so we agreed to take him home this one time. (I showed this entire post to Zvi before publishing it so he would know what I was writing about him and he wanted me to add that one time when he called home sick he really was sick. That was during camp this past summer and he had 100.4 fever. It's amazing that even he admits that he was only really sick one time because he's probably called home at least 30 times over the last few years.)

I pointed out to him that he always gets one free pass a year but we're not doing this again. He knows I mean it because last year he tried a few more times after the initial fake but it didn't work. The funny thing is that he really seems to be enjoying school especially when you consider the fact that he doesn't understand the language. He complains about going in the morning but after school he admits that it wasn't so bad. So far bla"h his adjustment (and really everybody's) has been much better than I anticipated.