Our nine year old child is going through the stage of flexing her independence muscles and she’s about to drive me crazy. She has been doing the opposite of just about everything I have asked her to do at home and now it’s happening at school as well. She’s in the fourth grade and as a part of a disciplinary measure she was sent to the lunch room, during the third grade lunch period, for supervision.

Well, I’m sure you can just imagine how embarrassing it would be for a fourth grader to have to eat lunch with a bunch of third graders. So, instead of going to the lunch room like she was told, she took her lunch and slipped quietly into the girl’s bathroom, unnoticed. After several staff members spent most of their lunch period looking for her, they weren’t very happy when they finally located her, in the bathroom. She spent the remainder of the school day in the principal’s office for in-school suspension. The principal also gave her a written warning about school safety and called home, to explain the whole thing to me, so there was no hiding the day’s activities from mom and dad.

Another thing she’s decided not to do, because the smell is just too embarrassing, is spray her hair in the morning with Tea Tree Oil. We’ve been doing this for the past 14 years to prevent head lice infestation. We make sure we use a little extra in the winter months when the children are wearing hats and piling coats together at school. When we know we’ll be around someone who has head lice, we also wear our hair up in a ponytail for added protection, but again, a ponytail is just too embarrassing for a nine year old.

So now she has head lice. She knew her cousin was being exposed every week to head lice, but chose to not follow the rules, even though the possible consequences had been explained to her. She actually took her hair down on the bus before she got to school because she couldn’t possibly be seen in a ponytail. Fortunately, some choices result in natural consequences, and thus learning follows (we hope), so she’ll be missing a few days of school while I remove all of the nits from her hair. It really is too bad that her fourth grade class had field trips planned this week.

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