Don’t disagree–I just got the impression he was watching TV and not the baby. I get the impression she’s watching the baby and doing the home tasks–and that seems to be no division of the labor.
I remember my daughter’s second grade teacher receiving kudos at Open House regarding the Science Projects on display in the halls of the school. She said so that everyone could hear:
Thank you for saying so. I know many who think I’m just an idiot with no clue how things really are, but I’m fine with that.
Awww, that’s really kind of you.I think this is good.
The time for him to shape up is NOW, not when it reaches critical mass. Because all that will happen is he’ll (rightly) say:
but honey…you were ok with it for before? Wha’ happened?
The re-training should begin now.
We see a lot of threads where mom is about to expire. Literally. And all because the hubs didn’t “realize” how hard it is to raise children. And that mama just can’t do EVERYTHING unaided.
Moms can accomplish a lot. But they can also go down, and become ill or depressed very quickly without at least some support from the hubs.
There’s many posters here who are blindly and proudly carrying the torch of motherhood!
And they’re bitter, angry, depressed, and exhausted.
UbiCaritas has some wonderful comments here. She’s a great mom. I’d hate to see her go down the rabbit hole and buy into that notion that you can be all things to all people ALL the time. People do it yes. Is it recommended? NO. Our faith certainly does not advocate this. Parents. Plural.
I came from a pretty dysfunctional house, where about all I learned as far as kid-raising goes was that “if the kid does something you don’t want or you find annoying or embarrassing, hit them until they stop” (Mom) or “ignore them until they annoy you, then yell at them” (Dad). Obviously, I want to parent differently, but it’s a lot easier to figure out how not to parent than how to parent…Praying for you Dear One.Awww, that’s really kind of you.
Actually, I wanted to thank several people on this thread. It’s spurred me on a bit to sit down and have a chat with DH some evening this week.
One of the issues I run into is that he’s generally willing to watch DD at least some while I do a project on a Saturday morning–and that’s great! Of the two of us, I’m definitely the fixer/DIYer; I’m very mechanically-minded, while he’s better with numbers and spreadsheets and such. Which is fine; we each have our talents, and it’s good that we use them as we do. Yes, he could learn how to fix stuff (oh, the joys of a 40-year-old house…) and I could learn how to do investments, but it would take much longer than if we keep the roles as they are, and the results in either area probably wouldn’t be quite as good.
However, once he’s watched DD for a morning, he seems to think that I’ve had my “fun” time, so he should get the afternoon off and spend it gaming and so on. Which leads to resentment: to me, rebuilding a toilet is not “fun” time, and after spending a morning working on something like that, spending the afternoon chasing DD without a break while he has fun leaves me annoyed and resentful.
So what I’m going to suggest is this: I’ll spend Saturday mornings on projects while he watches DD. We’ll alternate having Saturday afternoons “off.” Sunday mornings are church, and Sunday afternoons we’ll both try to relax as much as possible: I’ll have dinner in the oven or crockpot early on and the kitchen cleaned up, and DD can play while DH and I hang out and watch sports or what-have-you. She’s pretty good about that if we’re both just lying around in the same room.
Oh, and Mark: many thanks for the suggestions. Yes, in this particular generation of parenting, playpens aren’t really used much except as travel cribs. However, plenty of kids grew up using them and are just fine. I may resort to using one in this instance when she gets really obnoxious. Her behavior tends to escalate when she’s not getting the attention she wants, so she’ll be trying to climb into my lap and pound on the keyboard, and in the process will be pinching (usually not deliberately, though it still hurts), scratching (quite deliberately) and sometimes hitting (ditto). I pull her off the chair, tell her firmly “Do not hit/pinch/scratch, go play for a little while,” and then she’ll repeat the prior behavior, screeching the whole time and getting more and more upset. Eventually, she starts trying to hit her face on the corners of the desk. Thus my thought about baby jail–give her a couple of minutes somewhere where she can cool off while being safe. Of course, I’ll reward good behavior well, too.
Some of my parenting questions may sounds really silly to the experienced parent, so please bear with me.
However
Sometimes yes, sometimes no. It varies; some days he’ll watch her while I do projects, but last weekend, for example, I kept stepping away from the project to find her doing something really unsafe while she was being “watched,” so I brought her over with me while I was working instead. I don’t like conflict or difficult discussions, but sometimes those talks have to happen, and I think one is going to this week.
I, however, wait until DD is asleep and my chores are finished to game or watch, and that’s where the annoyance comes in.
Thus that upcoming conversation.Ohhhh yeah. And as mentioned upthread, I think it will also help when some other siblings are married and have kids. As it is now, we’re the only ones, and he has a lot of brothers who are single, working, and have (of course) lots of free time, so he’s comparing himself to that standard of free time rather than the average married-dad-of-one standard.
We usually manage pretty well with just Saturday morning dedicated to at-home maintenance projects, but 1) we have yard help twice a month 2) we have cleaning help twice a month and 3) at least one Saturday a month requires a lot of running errands outside the house (new shoes, haircuts, flu shots, etc.). But it’s definitely not all work all Saturday every week.Sometimes yes, sometimes no. It varies; some days he’ll watch her while I do projects, but last weekend, for example, I kept stepping away from the project to find her doing something really unsafe while she was being “watched,” so I brought her over with me while I was working instead. I don’t like conflict or difficult discussions, but sometimes those talks have to happen, and I think one is going to this week.
Oh, and re gaming PCs and the TV: that would be cutting off my nose to spite my face, as I enjoy gaming or a show as much as he does.
We come from really different backgrounds, albeit both conservative Catholic. He grew up fairly wealthy, and I absolutely broke. Neither his nor my parents are the DIY type. However, if something major got really broken at his parents’ house, they’d call someone to fix it. Mine would probably be too broke to do so, but they also always expected someone else to help them for free rather than learning how to fix something themselves, an attitude that seriously annoyed me by the time I was a teenager. They live in a house that will need to be condemned after they go–it’s that bad in terms of filth. They never cleaned, and had a lot of incontinent animals in the place. So when I was a teenager, I spent my Saturdays cleaning the house and fixing stuff, and then volunteered in the evenings. He spent his Saturdays either at sports meets or gaming. As a result, I think of Saturdays as a work day, and he doesn’t. I suspect the trick will be to find the happy medium between “no chores on Saturdays” and “spend all day working your butt off.”
That sounds very fair and reasonable.
We do have yard help twice a month, thank goodness, and that’s enough in all but the very rainiest weather to take care of most of the yardwork. We actually hired him when I got pregnant with DD and refused to do yardwork in the summer heat while pregnant. One of the best decisions we’ve made to date–I don’t have to nag DH or get stressed about the yard, and the yard guy does a much better job in far less time than it would take us.
Not a football household!
I was never a fan, but it’s important to DH, so I ended up learning enough to follow it.
Win-win for all!No parenting questions are silly–we’re all always learning all the time…I think the hardest part comes as they move into adulthood and you need to start treating them as adults–I think you can see from the first part of this thread that this is a problem area for most.Awww, that’s really kind of you.
Oh, and Mark: many thanks for the suggestions. Yes, in this particular generation of parenting, playpens aren’t really used much except as travel cribs. However, plenty of kids grew up using them and are just fine. I may resort to using one in this instance when she gets really obnoxious. Her behavior tends to escalate when she’s not getting the attention she wants, so she’ll be trying to climb into my lap and pound on the keyboard, and in the process will be pinching (usually not deliberately, though it still hurts), scratching (quite deliberately) and sometimes hitting (ditto). I pull her off the chair, tell her firmly “Do not hit/pinch/scratch, go play for a little while,” and then she’ll repeat the prior behavior, screeching the whole time and getting more and more upset. Eventually, she starts trying to hit her face on the corners of the desk. Thus my thought about baby jail–give her a couple of minutes somewhere where she can cool off while being safe. Of course, I’ll reward good behavior well, too.
Some of my parenting questions may sounds really silly to the experienced parent, so please bear with me.
However
Yeah. My parents were like that. A couple of flunked tests in grade school and I got the speech that if I didn’t get my act together, I’d be working in a sweat shop for pennies an hour, dressed in rags, living on food stamps, and generally a complete failure at life. Not entirely untrue, I suppose, but probably a bit much for a child not even in middle school. I eventually cared less about learning and more about how to make the grade to avoid my parents’ angry lectures. I think they eventually realized that and lightened up, and I did just fine, graduating college with a masters degree and landing a good job almost immediately. I think that’s a problem with school in general, though. More emphasis on grades than actual knowledge.