At my wit's end (not anymore)

**This is the post I started a couple of weeks ago. I wanted to go ahead and post it for other adoptive parents who might run into the same thing, and also for myself to see how Dima has progressed and gone through different stages. All of this happened at the end of September/beginning of October.**

In the past couple of weeks, Dima has been exhibiting some new behaviors at school. Namely, I was called once because he bit a boy and then this past Monday he spit on a teacher--his former teacher that he likes!


What's baffling about this is that we have NEVER seen these behaviors before. Not towards us, not towards Zhenya--not even to other kids when we were at the orphanage with them. In regards to the spitting, we found out that there are a couple of other boys in Dima's class who have been spitting. The problem is they haven't been caught, so Dima sees them doing it and not getting in trouble and thinks that's the way kindergartners are supposed to behave. The biting incident is still a little puzzling. The kid he bit (on the forearm) only had 3 teeth marks on one side of his arm. My suspicion is that the boys were playing and he grabbed Dima around the head and caught him in the mouth. The boy who was bitten told the teachers and the principal that it was an accident, so...who knows. And Dima's English isn't good enough to explain it in detail (although he does now know "no eat people, Mama" LOL), he can tell us what he did, who he bit, and what the consequences were.


But lately we're just seeing a lot more disobedience at school. He's still an angel (more or less ;)) at home so I'm baffled. Is he testing something? Is he testing us? or his teacher? Is he trying to see if school is the same as the orphanage (in terms of how they respond to his inappropriate behaviors)?