Parenting is hard y'all.

I'm sitting here at 3 AM contemplating our parenting fail tonight. We sucked. Badly.

Everyone knows that having a baby, or a toddler is hard. You think it should get easier when your kids get bigger. And it does. But also, it doesn't. Certain aspects become even more difficult.

Usually, we have good cop/bad cop. Tonight we had bad cop/worse cop. Peyton made a mistake on her online class. It wasn't the end of the world. Her attitude is what got her in trouble. Did her bad attitude warrant the amount of yelling we did? Nope, not even close. But, that's what happened. Did the yelling make the situation at all better? Again, nope. But, that's what happened.

Us yelling at her only made the situation worse. As I sit here and think about what made us handle it the way we did, I think it comes down to insecurity. By her screwing up, we feel like we failed. And maybe we did. This is her first online class. We let her handle it herself. That was probably a mistake as we most likely didn't teach her the skills to navigate something like this.

It's tough to step back in the heat of the moment. Last night, we didn't do that. Hopefully next time, we can be better. Are we horrible parents? Probably not. Do we feel horrible? Yep. But that's not the end of the world either.

All we can do at this point is learn from our mistakes and try to do better. And remind ourselves that parenting isn't always easy but we have be the grown-ups and model the behavior we expect to see from our kids. Now that is hard...