Frustrated Dad

iVillage Member
Registered: 09-09-2009
Frustrated Dad
2943
Wed, 09-09-2009 - 3:28am
I really need some opinions on my situation. I am a 30 year old dad with 3 children. I work 10-12 hrs a day 5 days a week and every other Saturday. I am pretty much a homebody, the only time I really go out is on Sundays during football season to watch the games. I do what i need to in order to support my wife and kids. But I am at wits end with my wife and need some help.
My wifes day is as follows. She wakes up any where from 10am - noon (which means 2 of our children (11 and 7) wake up feed themselves and walk to school) at which point she will got downstairs to the kitchen to light a cigarette and call her sister or best friend. During the 1/2hr to an hour that she is on the phone she will make (for herself)and drink about 3 cups of coffee. At around noon when the baby wakes up (11 months) she'll feed him change his diaper and set him on the floor and mostly ignore him as she calls her mother. Usually around 12:30 she'll head out to do errands leaving me with the baby until 1:30 when she'll get home so I can rush out to work where I'm 20 minutes away from and need to be in by 2.
Heres the thing i have no problem being the sole financial gainer in the house hold but I expect certain things. I guess thats the reason for this post to find out if my expectation are to lofty. I expect her to get up in the morning with the children make them breakfast help them pick out cloths make sure they have their homework and send them off to school( I would even help in the morning but i got sick of waking up in the morning while shes still sleeping when i was the one at work last night). I would like breakfast every once in a while made when i wake up i don't expect it but it would be nice. I would like the baby up before 11am I just don't think he should be sleeping that long. i expect laundry the be cleaned, folded and put away! The laundry in our house gets washed and dried them it usually ends up on the dining room table for half the day then it makes its way over to the living room where its folded and left on the couch for a day or two (is it to much to ask to have it put away). I expect the house clean! Cleaning the kitchen for her consist of of doing the dishes and mopping the floor! Cabinets, frig, counters, stove maybe once a month. Cleaning the dinning room consist of her wiping the table and vacuuming one area of the carpet. Bathroom, living room are cleaned in the same manner and the children's room and bedroom upstairs can go months without cleaning! I expect lunch made before i got to work! No breakfast and lunch not even a packed lunch/diner!I expect a home cooked diner for my children! Not pizza, macaroni or canned spaghetti!!! Is this to much to ask? i expect diner when I get home, real food not something she sends me on yoville or farmtown, which she's on until 2am!! DO I EXPECT TO MUCH? I thought these where to things a stay at home mom did? Are my expectations to old school? I need answers I feel like I'm being taken advantage of and I don't know how much longer I can last.

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iVillage Member
Registered: 01-08-2009
In reply to: daddy_gil
Wed, 03-10-2010 - 10:15am
This "teaching to the test" pressure on both teachers and students is one of the reasons my kids are in private school.
iVillage Member
Registered: 01-08-2009
In reply to: daddy_gil
Wed, 03-10-2010 - 10:18am
One hopes that education really will prevent some teen pregnancies, or else why bother, if it has no effect? I agree that you cannot control the actions of a single teen, but if educated teens are less likely to become pregnant or get an STD, then education probably is lowering the teen birth/disease rate, and by definition, preventing some pregnancies or disease transmissions that might otherwise have occurred.
iVillage Member
Registered: 06-27-1998
In reply to: daddy_gil
Wed, 03-10-2010 - 10:25am

I didn't quote just that line, but the entire post....but I would think it would be easier to ask, then create....but okay.

PumpkinAngel

PumpkinAngel

iVillage Member
Registered: 01-08-2009
In reply to: daddy_gil
Wed, 03-10-2010 - 10:25am
Individual professors should not have to look at IEPs and try to figure out what to do to accommodate individual students with disabilities or learning differences. We are not trained to do this; there are a wide variety of different accommodations/technologies out there that we might not even know about. We don't know, often, what will help the kid succeed. Plus there have to be controls over how disabilities/differences are documented and defined. You might not believe this, but there are perfectly "normal" but lazy students who will claim "disability" in order to get a grade changed or a deadline extended (these are the same students who lose fifteen grandparents, all right before finals week, over the course of a four year college career). In any case, how it works at our university is that students who need accomodations register at the Disability Services Office, they are then tested if necessary (some students only find out about their LDs in college, or need accommodations for the first time in college) and introduced to techniques and technologies that can help them out. Professors who work with these students are then notified about what accommodations are necessary and in place, and we have no say over whether to implement them or not. If the plan says the kid needs a peer notetaker, or large print/alternate format textbooks, or to take tests in a secluded place, or needs time and a half to take a test, or whatever, we provide that for the student.
iVillage Member
Registered: 01-08-2009
In reply to: daddy_gil
Wed, 03-10-2010 - 10:28am
This situation is what IEPs and 504s are made for. We have also run into one or two "professionals" who are not willing to move two inches to one side to accommodate my son's issues. I tell him that there are people in the world like that, even out of the educational system, so he might as well learn to deal with them, but he was fifteen when I had to tell him that, not five.
iVillage Member
Registered: 06-27-1998
In reply to: daddy_gil
Wed, 03-10-2010 - 10:29am

No it's not, teaching and education is different from physicaly stopping a child from making a mistake.

PumpkinAngel

Avatar for mom34101
iVillage Member
Registered: 03-27-2003
In reply to: daddy_gil
Wed, 03-10-2010 - 10:31am
I think that's our disconnect. You're talking about older kids and older situations (like safe sex above). I'm talking about not letting a 2-yr-old burn himself on the stove. You teach him that the stove is hot, AND you supervise him around the stove until you know you can trust him not to touch it (which takes way more than once). I think it's silly for a parent to say she'll let her kid make any mistake. Of course we keep our kids from making mistakes. As they get older, the things you wish you could keep them from doing are no longer in your control the way the stove is.
iVillage Member
Registered: 06-27-1998
In reply to: daddy_gil
Wed, 03-10-2010 - 10:31am

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PumpkinAngel

iVillage Member
Registered: 06-27-1998
In reply to: daddy_gil
Wed, 03-10-2010 - 10:32am

I don't think it works the same way....


PumpkinAngel

Avatar for rollmops2009
iVillage Member
Registered: 02-24-2009
In reply to: daddy_gil
Wed, 03-10-2010 - 10:32am
Yes, of course. As I said, it can lower the incidence, but it can't prevent it 100%. Nothing really can, short of locking them up. The original question was something along the lines of "if your teen is caught having unsafe sex, wouldn't you stop it?"

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America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up.

Oscar Wilde

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