Of course the thoughts and awareness are there, but it's all incomplete and often fanciful - kids know there's something to know, and they fill in a bunch of the blanks with their imaginations if their parents haven't had the conversations and/or established themselves as sources of information. It's rare that the kids know nothing at all, and the somethings they do know are often only partially right or flat-out wrong.
People who make babies surrender their right to behave like them.
If you take the time to listen to an upset child's story with empathy, and guide the child toward figuring out the root of the problem, then the result is often that the child not only calms down, but also in the future is less likely to get so upset.
There is a connection between environment and stress on both ends, with excessive clutter and excessive attention to detail both holding the power to distract us from our ability to love fully, work productively and relax effectively. So, what makes sense to me is for each of us to think this through on a few fronts: what constitutes a comfortable environment for us, how much effort we're willing to put into it relative to other priorities, and how well-matched we need our partners' preferences to be to ours.
For some people, the better route for finding like-minded parents is just to get out of your house with your baby and frequent baby-friendly places.
Make sure you have legal cover for what you're doing.
If you're not sure what you want, then hold back from making plans or responding to invitations until you have a chance to think about it.
If the guests want to wrest the check away from the host, because the host is also the guest of honor, then the guest who volunteers has to cover the whole thing. A guest can't volunteer -all- of the guests to pay for the host/honoree.
I actually recommend as little actual counting as possible in a life partnership. But, when there's a sense of injustice brewing between you, some counting is inevitable, and so my advice is to count using as broad a scope as possible. It's not just hours worked or chores done, either, and it's not even just about the household - it's a system of Whole Marriage Thinking. It's about hours worked, chores done, goals supported, emotional needs met, everything. What it all takes out of you, what it all gives back. It all factors in.
Moving is hard. Staying is easy. Logistically speaking, at least. And this is true whether you're doing or undoing something.
It takes awareness that it's not only not a bad thing to let others do things their own way, it is in fact an improvement. It makes life richer and more interesting.
All of us assign different values to things, and not all of those values are going to line up with others'.
Plan your own vacations when you want to, and plan a suitable combined vacation with this other family when you want to. If they freak out at your planning your own vacations as you see fit, then let them. Bowing to unreasonable demands because someone will make you pay emotionally if you don't is not a healthy option.
A lot of support gets withheld out of fear of awkwardness and misspeaking.
We all make deals with ourselves when it comes to the difficult people in our lives.
It's probably good for your body and brain to get moving occasionally.
I'm sure there are people who can toggle quickly from all-in caregiving to structured socializing, but I can't think of any offhand.
Separation is where you see if it works better with the adults in two different homes.
Your parents' views are, by current standards, out there. Getting in their faces about it would be needlessly disrespectful, but there's no reason for you to tiptoe through their delusional little terrarium as if you can't bend even one blade of grass.
I think a person who arranges the event and orders the food also picks up the check - even the birthday person, even when people at the table insist on paying for the birthday person.
When you fail to see something, that doesn't mean I'm hiding it.
There has been, for some reason (or more likely an unfortunate accumulation of reasons) a trend over the past several decades for parents to do the work of parenting in the isolation of their own homes - and not only that, this trend has overlapped with the other trend of much deeper parent involvement in raising kids. That you also represent trend No. 3, more people raising kids solo, has only exacerbated a close-to-no-win situation.
I do crosswords when I have time to kill somewhere, and am 100 percent successful on filling in the spots I get stuck on - after I close up, do something else, and then go back to it.
Awkwardness is when there's a risk of a perception gap between what you mean and what you appear to mean.
The topic of sexual education makes me nuts, because kids are certainly not now and have rarely ever been "clueless" about what adults do and delude themselves about keeping from their kids. Especially now that so many of them are carrying the entire internet around in their pockets.
