323: Parenting a 3-Year-Old is Hard…Here’s How I’m Surviving 😵‍💫

I have always heard about, and I'm putting this in quotes, the terrible twos.

Like even before I became a mom, I'd heard that phrase so often.

Truthfully, the twos were pretty straightforward for us.

And I was like, oh, okay, this is the terrible twos.

Amazing.

Like we've got this.

Joke's on me because then my sweet angel daughter turned three and And excuse my language, but all hell broke loose, y'all.

Like, it really felt like a switch flipped.

And all of a sudden, she was pushing boundaries, disobeying, having tantrums.

And my husband and I were like, what is happening? Like, what do we do here? She was throwing a fit over us giving her the wrong cup or opening her snack wrong or putting on her blanket wrong.

We spent a good like two months just kind of flailing and throwing things at the wall to see what stuck parenting wise and nothing felt like it was working.

My bestie was over a few weeks ago and her daughter is almost three and she's been experiencing some of the same challenges.

And we were just chatting about how it's so easy to do parenting.

silly things and say silly things when you're in the heat of the moment if you don't have a rhythm or a plan to follow during these toddler outbursts and when I say silly things I mean like things that you say or do and then afterwards you're like oh my god like why did I say that and There are so many times when I'll discipline Everly as in discipline to teach from my own dysregulated state.

And then I'll have to go back and apologize and kind of like reparent because I wasn't proud of how I handled something.

I talked about this in the last episode, but my brain loves a framework.

I find comfort in them.

They help keep me emotionally regulated and make decisions from an emotionally stable place rather than going off the rails, if you know what I'm saying.

So naturally, I made up a framework that I call the four C's to handle the threes.

And it's really helped me navigate being the mom of a three-year-old in a sane-ish way.

Emphasis on the ish, okay? So before I share it with you, I want to share some stuff that's brought me a lot of comfort as a parent.