Fail

Well I guess I fail. I only made it two days in my quest to write every day. I totally intended to post last night and then the girls got into what should have been a minor dispute that turned into an epic fight that ended up involving both the boyfriend and I intervening. Over a bean bag chair. There was screaming and crying and yelling and all possessions taken from each others rooms and declarations of never being able to touch each others things and so on. The thing is the girls get along 95% of the time, but the 5% of the time they don't it is horrible.
Now part of my problem is that I have only raised one of these girls so my expectations of her are different than my expectations of of the other because I have only been in her life for almost a year and I have only been living with her for about 4 months. I am trying to figure out how to have compassion for all these kids who are going through divorces, whose parents all have new partners, and who are adjusting to new living situations. I may have over compensated with compassion and slacked on discipline though and now I have to attempt to correct the problem without over-correcting. This is going to be tricky. . .
Just to be clear, I do not parent these kids alone. My boyfriend and I are truly partners. After an awful trip to the grocery store with the kids today I sent them all to their rooms because I didn't know what else to do. Luckily he got home from work right then and I explained how ridiculously misbehaved they were and he stepped in and handled them the rest of the night. He always backs me up and discuss how to parent the kids even though I am the one who is with them most of the time. We make every effort to show the kids that we work together, make decisions together and cannot be played. But at this time I stay home so I am the primary caretaker so the actual discipline falls to me.
As of now I have taken my anxiety pill, the kids are all grounded from TV for at least today and after school tomorrow until the boyfriend gets home, and there is relative peace in the household. It was not one of our better days, but tomorrow the kids will probably have forgotten how angry I was and I will see my baby's smiling face in the morning and the big kids will tell me they need coffee too when they see me get mine and I will have hope that it will be a better day.