The Van

As I've mentioned before, the van to school can be an issue. For whatever reason, Sam can have a great morning, and then get on the van screaming and crying. Apparently, he is usually fine by the time he rounds the corner, but it is still stressful and anxiety producing to place a screaming/flailing child on a van and seat belt him in.Today, though, he was happy as a clam to get on the bus and giggled his way to and on the van. You never know...

The second problem is the unbuckling. He does this occasionally, but increasingly rarely, in the car with us. He's more apt to unbuckle himself as we approach our house or our street. But on the bus, it is such a regular occurrence that it is a safety issue, because the driver has to stop the van. First we tried a seat belt lock, which he quickly figured out (but which I had a difficult time figuring out). Then they got a monitor to ride with Sam on the bus. Another stressful, embarrassing thing to think about and wait for phone calls about. The monitors seem to only be marginally effective. They are not trained in any specific way, and so I think they just sit next to him and tell him to stay in his seat and not unbuckle. They often ask us what we do when he unbuckles, which makes sense, but doesn't really apply since we can stop the car and turn around and give him THE LOOK. Which comes with THE VOICE. We end up feeling kind of dumb and helpless since there is not a whole lot we can do to fix the situation. It's like someone continually telling you about something you can't fix and that makes you feel like shit.