Co-Parenting... Should Be Easy Right?

You would THINK that 2 people in a good marriage and similar views on how to discipline their children could actually follow through TOGETHER and parent their children TOGETHER wouldn't you? Well, I can attest that it's NOT always true.

In that incident I just posted about regarding Juliana (biting Grace) I'm the one who dealt with it. The girls were upstairs, in Juliana's room, as Manny was in our bedroom which is right next to Juli's room. He had the door closed, was with Anneliese playing a video game, and could hear what was going on. He even blockaded the door so that Juliana and Grace couldn't go into our room to horse around. Why you ask? Because when he watches them he doesn't actually watch them, and if he was playing a video game and they were in there, he would continue to play the PS2 as if the girls weren't there. He completely disregarded the issue and locked them out. When I asked him "couldn't you hear all the screaming and insults Juliana was yelling at Grace and then Grace crying in pain" he responded with "I thought Juliana was just mad that I locked her out of our room." Derrrrr.

So anyway, he had NO CLUE what had happened until I called him downstairs to look at Grace's arm where the bites were. He went upstairs to Juli's room, and starts soft-talking her asking her why she did that. Hell with that, buddy... I yelled up to Juliana "You get your ass down here Juliana Rose! You have some explaining to do!" She came down, crying, cuz she KNEW she was screwed.

I sat her down in the dining room, and showed her what she did to Grace. I kept my cool but made sure she could tell I was angry and disappointed. I told her how sad what she did makes me. I talked with her, and didn't lay into her screaming or hitting, I just really talked her good up and down. She broke down in real tears at the end, and went to apologize to Grace on her own.

During this, Manny decides to play strict parent. I let him say what he needed, but really even then he didn't "handle" it. Just saying the words that he thought he should say, mimicking me. Fine, I can use the back-up but where the hell was the prevention in the first place huh? So I quietly laid into HIM because as I said before, it's really half his fault that it got as far as it did.

He really is a great Daddy, but when it comes to stuff like this, I just don't know what to do. I end up being the bad guy because I discipline all the time. Why doesn't he understand that he doesn't get to choose when to parent???