Welcome to Mothership: Parenting stories you actually want to read, whether you're thinking about or passing on kids, from egg-freezing to taking home baby and beyond. Because motherhood is a big if — not when — and it's time we talked about it that way.
Parenting may not be an Olympic sport, but that doesn't mean one can't benefit from having a teammate to pass certain tasks off to — especially when there's more than one child in play. For Kristen Bell, that teammate is her husband Dax Shepard, who knows that co-parenting occasionally means doing a kid handoff.
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At the Alliance of Moms' Raising Baby event on Saturday, Bell — who is mom to Delta, 2, and Lincoln, 4 — revealed to People the kid-swapping strategy she and Shepard have for keeping themselves cool under parenting pressure.
"We switch kids all the time," the Veronica Mars star told the outlet. "[If] I’m talking to the [two-year-old] and I’m done, I’ll just be like, 'We’ve got to switch. I don’t want to talk to this kid anymore.'"
Bell and Shepard are very much a team now, but the Good Place star revealed that this wasn't always the case. In fact, in an interview with Harry Connick Jr. on his talk show Harry back in September, the actress stated that she had to work on her fighting style.
"We'd get in a fight — and we would fight…a lot — and I would like, yell something, then I'd slam the bedroom door, then I'd slam the front door, then I'd get in my car, then I’d skid out the driveway, and then I'd just go like, sit around the corner in my car, and it felt so good," she revealed on Harry.
She added that was not okay with her now-husband, who gave her an ultimatum.
"Three months into our relationship he was like, ‘You can't leave anymore during fights. I'm not going to do that.' I was like, ‘What?' He's like you can't do that, I'm not going to have a relationship, he has a very high standard and a strong code of ethics. He was like, ‘No, I have more respect for myself, I love you but I'm not going to do that my whole life.'"
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Clearly, everything has worked out for the best, and the two now have an adorable family. However, that doesn't mean the pair don't occasionally slip up in their parenting game. On the Ellen DeGeneres Show, Shepard revealed that he accidentally dropped an F-bomb in front of Lincoln, leading to a very interesting situation at a pool party:
"Swear to God, [Lincoln is] in the pool, [and] she goes, 'This pool's fucking warm,'" Shepard told DeGeneres on the talk show. "Side note, we were like, 'She's nailing the syntax. She knows [how to use it] as an adjective, as an adverb.' We were proud, and she stopped saying it."
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