He Blogs, She Blogs: Don't Make Me Turn This Car Around!

Chad a.k.a Captain Dumbass: The Male

LOOK AT ME WHEN I'M TALKING TO YOU!!!

Ok, are you listening to me now? Are you? I don't ca- *inner ABS kicks in* It doesn't matter what your brother said... This week on HBSB, parenting styles and discipline. Oh ya. You just rolled your eyes. I know, it's a headache for all of us. We all come into it with different ideas of how to handle it, and it's never the same as our partners.

In my house, we fall into the stereotypical roles of good cop/bad cop. I've got the vocal range, the heavy step and the glare of doom. I'm the Dirty Harry of Bad Cops. Old and grizzled. Full of righteous thunder and damnation.



My wife? Good cop. Pushes me out of the interrogation room after I've swept the incriminating photos and stale coffee cups off the desk and kicked my chair over. "Look, I don't know how long I can control my partner, if you just come clean maybe we can make a deal..." Her patience amazes me, and also settles me down once I've blown my top. She gets down to their level and figures out what's going on which usually gives me time to catch a breath and realize I'm being an idiot. But you know what? If the good cop/bad cop routine didn't work it wouldn't still be around, would it?

And the secret to a good GCBC routine is changing it up every once in awhile so it doesn't go stale and your ___ year old is reciting your lines back to you before you get to them. Every once in awhile I'm the good cop. I'm the one trying to reason with everybody and using my inside voice. When my wife goes off, the kids they know they are in it deep. The woman is like a Dementor, she even scares the shit out of me. Any incident that involves Dad intervening is a lesson learned or at least not soon forgotten. And you cannot imagine how long I just spent trying to find a decent image of a Dementor. Why aren't there more images of them? Then I was fishing around trying to think of a 'good' cop for an image but got stuck on Danny Glover and sure my wife isn't a large African-American man but you try finding a tv/film cop duo starring a female South East Asian, and again, where the hell are all the images of Sgt. Roger Murtaugh?

So now it's only a few minutes until our publishing time and I'm spiralling out of control so you should probably just skip on ahead to Petra's piece since she can actually write and string two thoughts together and I don't even know how to close this off. Seriously. Go. I'm putting a bullet in this one.

Petra a.k.a. The Wise (Young) Mommy: The Female

So, this week for He Blogs, She Blogs, we are discussing parenting styles, discipline and giving into your kids.

You know the deal--good guy/bad guy, the softie versus the dictator, the one that turns into a puddle of mush when the little one gives the puppy dog eyes, as opposed to the one that has nerves of steel when it comes to the kids. There is no shortage of marital discord when it comes to raising children; I don't know many couples who completely agree with how to parent their children. Once again, Mars and Venus strikes again--men and women just look at things so differently.

For instance, my husband thinks that louder is better. Don't get me wrong, I have my moments of losing my cool and having a little tantrum when my kids are acting like the devil's spawn. But he goes from 0 to 60 in .2 seconds and it never serves to do anything but create more chaos in whatever situation he is trying to diffuse. It also took me a long time to get him out of the mind set that "touchy feely" parenting isn't all that bad, and it is actually good to sit down with children and talk to them when they are upset or acting out.

But perhaps, maybe, just maybe I am sometimes a little too emotional. Like when I let the kids drive me to tears, thus losing all control of the situation. And maybe sometimes I let things go that I shouldn't, wanting to pick my battles, you know? But seriously, a mom gets tired of saying the SAME DAMN THINGS all day long to her children, so sometimes it comes time to turn the other cheek. (No, not the "kiss my ass" cheek, the other one.)

Now, when my daughter came into this world, there came a whole new issue. All of a sudden, when hubby looked into her big, blue eyes and her halo of golden blonde hair, he couldn't say no. A Daddy's Girl had been born and he became the one of us to ALWAYS give in to what she wanted, especially since she was such a sweet infant and toddler up to the age of 3. Mommy became the big bad villain, so you can imagine the fanfare when Daddy came home from work in those days. Now that she is going through the torrid, TERRIBLE, no good, very bad 3's, it's a little easier for him to say no to her, I think.

But me, my nerves are so shot by the end of the day that when she asks 5,245 times for a cookie in the same high pitched, whiny voice while following me around with seemingly no plans of stopping, I have been known in a moment of weakness to give in and give her the damn cookie. Cause, really, my sanity is worth it to me. But you see, when I have my housekeeper, personal assistant and part-time mother's helper, this will never happen and I will be a rock. Riiiggghhtt...

All in all, I think we have gotten fairly good at working together and being on the same page, but I remember the days when my stepson acting up and the two of us wanting to handle it totally different ways turned into a huge blowout between the two of us, in the end neither one of us even remember what he had done to spark it in the first place. The good thing about these moments now is that the two of us have been sufficiently beaten into submission by our children so our number one priority is always to nip the bad behavior in the bud and we know we have to gang up on them to accomplish that. There's two of us, and two of them, so we are almost on a level playing field.

If we have another kid, we are in serious trouble.