Big changes...

Yesterday was a big day in our treehouse.
Bugaboo and Peanut were both officially adopted by Mr. Incredible, Peanut slept in her big girl bed last night for the first time, and she also slept without a diaper or pullup. Like I said, big changes.

Many blended families go through big changes, in our home we have had nothing but changes for the last two years. Some days we jell and other days...well other days are less jell-er-ific. Mr. Incredible and I have learned some very important things while blending our family.

1. No matter how frustrating life gets, we are on the same team! Sometimes we have to remind each other of this when life gets to be overwhelming.

2. Bio, step, adopted...it doesn't matter. We are raising 5 beautiful monkies together and they are all ours.

3. We try REALLY hard not to call each other out if one goes overboard on a consequence. For example, "You are grounded forever and never doing anything ever again." Seems like a fair consequence...until 5 minutes later when we are talking and we go, "okay...so maybe that was a tad overboard?" Yeah...we talk about it after and process and then process with the kids. We never process in front of them, we back each other up and present a united front.

4. It is okay for us to tell our monkeys that we made a mistake (see #3). We are humans. We make mistakes. We teach our children to take responsibility for their mistakes by taking responsibility for our own.

5. We take time to calm down before distributing consequences for less than stellar choices.

Belle got caught lying yesterday (when will they learn that we always find out?). Mr. Incredible and I spoke with her about how it was unacceptable and how disappointed we were. A phrase we use a lot is, "We love you too much to let you grow up thinking that this is okay." Her consequence was not given until this morning. We told her that there would be a consequence but that she needed to give us time to cool down so that it wasn't unreasonable. When we gave her the consequence this morning (restitution), we talked again to make sure she understood that it was her choices that brought her to this place.

There are many other things we have learned but those are the huge ones. I am always looking for blended family parenting advice though. On Pinterest (I'm an addict), on Facebook, even just on Google...I'm always looking. Yesterday, as everyone in our family legally has the same last name now, I came across this blog post from The (Reformed) Idealist Mom. It had some great advice and was definitely a situation that many a frappucino family could relate to.

What's your biggest parenting challenge (blended family or not)? What's the biggest thing your kids have taught you?