My husband works 5 days a week & for those 5 days is up at 5.00am (home by about 4.00pm). He works at a physical & dirty job as a mechanic in a coal mine. When he comes home he showers & then plonks on the couch until dinner is ready & then after dinner he is back on the couch until bed time.
I am up every morning at 6.00am with our 13 month old daughter. I am also up with her for about 30 minutes each night for a middle of the nigt breast feed & a cuddle back to sleep. I spend my day cleaning the house, doing laundry, looking after our daughter & cooking his dinner. While he is on the couch after dinner I am back in the kitchen cleaning up the dinner mess & making his lunch for the following day at work.
I don't ask my husband to get up to our daughter over night (even when he has the next day off). I don't ask him to cook dinner (he offers to BBQ usually one night a week so all I have to do that night is a couple of salads & the cleaning up). I don't ask him to clean up the house or do laundry or do grocery shopping.
What I do ask is the following:
1. Do stuff to the car that needs doing;
2. Mow the lawns when they need doing;
3. Take the heavy bins out to the road each week (I bring them in when they are empty & light because if they stay out all day idiots run them over);
4. Look after our daughter (including feed & bath her) one night a week so I can go to my weight watchers meeting (from 4.45pm to 6.15pm); and
5. On ONE of his days off I ask that HE gets up to her in the morning at 6.00am & give her some breakfast & get her ready for the day so I can have a sleep in. On his other day off I do the same for him so he can have a sleep in. I still do the overnight wake-up as she is still having a breast feed & he is, obviously, incapable of providing this for her.
This week on his days off, he asked if he could have the first sleep in which was fine, I don't care what day I get to sleep in! The only problem is, when it came to the next morning he said he was too tired to get up & I had a two choices, I could either get up to our daughter or sleep in while she screamed in her cot (he can sleep through her crying, I cannot & nor would I want to). So I got up to her & got her breakfast & got her dressed for the day & when he FINALLY surfaced at 8.00am he had the hide to ask me if I would make him a hot breakfast!!!!!
He claimed that he had been so tired because it was a busy week & I should just be happy that he goes out & earns money so we have a roof over our heads & food in our bellies. This made me even angrier because the fact that we have a child & I quit work to care for her was a JOINT decision & me being a stay-at-home Mum was more important to him that it was to me!!!!! I was more than happy to accept my Mum's offer to have her a couple of days each week while I went back to work part-time but hubby was adamant that we should raise our child.
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