Seeing eye to eye

T & I talked about anything and everything before we were married and continuing on before we had kids.  We did the long-distance thing for 2 years and then were married for 2 before having H.  Plus our families live 800 miles apart so cue 17 hour road trips.  We had a lot of time on our hands to just talk.

We talked about kids and our parenting styles - spanking, public vs private school, allowance policy, household chores, etc.   I definitely recommend this to all couples who are thinking about having kids.  If there's one thing most people are stubborn on it's parenting choices and it only gets worse once you're actually a parent.  We had all the major things down and a plan of attack in place so we wouldn't be stuck with kids in an epic apocalyptic battle on co-sleeping.

Things obviously have changed as parenting has gone from an abstract concept to reality, but since we've had our dig-your-heels-in, head-in-the-sand arguments already we can discuss a new approach with civility.  Except, it seems, with the small stuff.  Most recently marker usage.

I have a planner and I like to color coordinate everything. 1 color for each member of the family, 1 for different types of events, etc.  So T got me a 16 shade assortment of those felt-tip marker/pens last year for my birthday -- yeah it's dorky, but I was excited!  H can uncap them now and she loves to color on things.  So I give her a notebook or paper and a marker and let her go nuts.  The other day she colored her hand & her face with green.  It came off in the bath, but not at the sink so most of the day she looked like her dad might've been Bruce Banner.

T was so upset.  He snatched the marker away and put it on the shelf and told me not to give her markers anymore.  I was pissed that he made her cry for no good reason and that he tried to boss me.  We both got attitudes and fought about this.  Seriously.  He threw out that I wasn't giving her proper supervision.  I told him to stop being so uptight & stifling her creativity. 

We're all fine now, but there still hasn't been a consensus on coloring.  The adult thing to do would be discuss the issue and come up with guidelines for location, materials, level of interaction, etc. that we both are happy with -- limiting the mess without limiting her freedom.  But what I'll probably do is bust out the finger paints one day when he says he's on his way home and encourage H to run and give him a hug immediately before he knows what hit him :).