to be fed up with this and to have really lost respect for dh.

[martini84]

I posted on here before re dh for shouting at the dc for no not putting rubish in bin etc etc.
We had a gentle discussion about this which didn't go brilliantly but I thought at least its out in the open.
However, nothing has changed.
Every night he leave a mug or glass where sits. I have to move these as we have an exploring baby. One night he left his tablets within baby's reach.
If he has a beer he leave empty bottle, lid and bottle opener on the side.
Whenever he does a diy he leave drill, socket sets etc wherever he was doing job.
I can clean the whole kitchin and within minutes he will cut a pizza or bread and create more crumbs.
Clothes get thrown on floor after wear. I ignore ones in our bedroom but I am now finding socks etc all over the house.
I am so fed up.
Aibu to ask how on earth can I get him to clean up after himself.
I largely sahm so do the housework but this is just making life impossible and I am feeling resentful.

Thank you.

Take all the stuff he leaves at his arse and pile it on his side of the bed. Repeat until he gets the message.

What Artemisa said. My DH is terrible for leaving clothing around the place. I pick it up and put it down his side of the bed. If it can't make it to the wash basket it doesn't get washed.

Tell him that as an adult you expect him to clear up after himself, you have enough children to look after.

If he continues tell him you will start throwing stuff away, you are not his servant.

I would be feeling resentful too and would be having a few words which weren't so gentle!

It's irresponsible and neglectful parenting to leave harmful things, like pills, within the reach of small children. It is also hugely disrespectful to you to let you pick up after him all the time. As a sahm, your job is to look after the dc, and the house while he is at work, not be treated like a skivvy for a lazy man.

I would lay it all out for him that he needs to start behaving like an equal partner and equal parent and not expect you to do all the thinking for him and all the clearing up. Once he is home from work, domestic stuff should be shared out.

Most people when they become parents for the first time, aren't used to thinking about child safety, but you have learned to and there are time limits on how long he can be thoughtless. The wellbeing of his dc is 50% his responsibility and he needs to have this hammered home.

I couldn't remain living with someone who refused to change.

My dh is a bit like this, especially annoying is the stinking running kit, trainers and wet towels that are left draped all over the house or left festering in bags. It reeks.
No amount of asking or reminding worked. So I put them all in the bin with the dirty nappies. That worked.

Tablets being left out is a whole other level. Tell him you are inviting the health visitor around to talk to him about it. I find a threat to involve a third party works on dh as he would be mortified if he was criticised by anyone else.

Fortunately tablet thing was a one off. Now safely out of reach. But this is our third child. He really should know better.

Yes he should know better. He sounds like he has zero respect for you.
Maybe make a rule that if its dumped on the floor it goes in the bin.

DH was messy like this too (and still isn't brilliant TBH) but after many heated discussions it took my mum staying for a week to make me see I wasn't being unreasonable!

She was over helping me unpack and stuff after a house move my DH was at work. Every five minutes all I could hear from her was "what the fuck's he left this here for?!" "what's this?!" "bloody hell I'd have murdered him by now!"

She caught me picking up shirts off the floor and said "what are doing now? Stop that! Here's a box look chuck all that shite in here and shove it in the corner. If he wants it he can rummage through there. If he wants it clean he can put it in the basket himself!"

And my mum loves DH to bits :)

I suspect he thinks secretly that if you are SAHM then you are responsible for clearing up after him.

I might start with the low hanging fruit and discuss safety first- tablets and DIY gear- and make the point that as you are not psychic, there will be an accident if he leaves something lying around and the baby notices it before you do.

If he is in a total irrational phase, he will freak out, you can have the "why are you being so weird" conversation with him, and it will still be all about child safety, so he can't divert into the " you are at home so you do it" argument.

It is interesting that he is doing this now with your third child. Is he feeling jealous/overwhelmed? Perhaps what you need is some free childcare from a nice mother/friend and a weekend away to talk. You can grit your teeth and listen to his whinging about how nobody at work appreciates his genius or whatever it is, and you can talk about how hard it is to teach children to be tidy and how you'd love the house to be just that bit more adult and calm.

The other thing is- tablets- does he suffer from depression?

No not depression. I think tbh he has always been abit messy. Seems to have got worse now. Although maybe I just have less time, energy or patience to deal with it.

That's probably it! It isn't that he's getting worse it's just that you have less and less time to sort the mess out yourself so it seems to be getting worse.

The way I put it to my DH was that I felt he was throwing stuff down with the mindset that it was "my job" to pick it up. He actually doesn't have that attitude to me at all and felt quite bad that that's how I took it.

I do the vast majority of housework at the minute and I don't mind I am at home with DD and pregnant again, so just work p/t in the evenings but do as much as possible during the day to make evenings and weekends free for all of us.

I only feel it's taking the piss if he doesn't keep things tidy as he goes along as that creates work for me that would have otherwise taken a few seconds for him e.g putting things back where he got them etc... It soon adds up to an extra chore for me when it doesn't need to.

Sympathy! I am about to spend my summer holidays (I am back at work now, I am a lot older than you) doing a mega declutter of the house as it has reached a tipping point of filth and misery. I am not sure how come we ended up here, but suspect my DD who is a clutter magpie and has way too much stuff, and appears to be completely blind to how much she leaves behind.

It may be a combo of things. Three kids is a lot more than two, somehow (I had three in four years so I can remember). He may be being messy because he feels it doesn't matter so much. but the fact that he yells at your DD suggests he would like the same as you, just doesn't know how to get there without effort.

Do you have/could you run to a cleaner? If someone else gets the house shiny once a week, it takes pressure off both of you. Then you can maintain it by "setting an example" to the kids, ahem.

Part of the problem is i just can't get it done during the day. Dd 9 months is a human whirlwilnd. Unless she is asleep she is constantly on the go.
So i finding myself having to do loads evenings and weekends too.

Cleaner could help but no doubt dh will say we can't afford it.

People have different tolerences for mess but I can only sympathise with you- I used to live with a ex partner like this - totally unable to see that things needed done, left in his care for a day or two and the house was chaotic and getting grubby, and Id trot around after him like an unpaid maid putting everything in its place and cleaning up his mess and making excuses for it. This incompatibility was just one of the reasons we split up - because I felt like I was becoming a mother to him. And it was so damned unfair - I spent so much time and energy on these basic life tasks for both of us and he just carried on like a big daft grubby wean.

Before anyone jumps on me I am not suggesting LTB, despite the above!
(I now am married to wonderful DP who can clean like a demon when required and spontaneously does about half the housework and cooking and sometimes more (stealth boast!). The difference is we do the tasks that needed done as they need done, and he can see what needs done because hes lived on his own enough, and hes come from a family, all boys who were expected to pitch in and do housework.

Does your DP see the mess at all? In shared accommodation we cured a messy flatmate by putting all the dishes she left unwashed in her bed. You could put a cardboard box at his side of the bed and over a day just put everything hes left out for you to clear up in it. Then he cant ignore it, there's a box of evidence of the scale of the problem

Would getting some experienced person (hv, friend or professional) to babyproof eg someone neutral who could look round and point out to him the safety hazards without it coming from you (again) so that he cant file it under some convenient category such as nagging?

Martini, maybe he would say that, but you could suggest time limit. I wangled a cleaner just for six months when I had dc3. In the event we never cancelled her as it made such a difference to both of us. I was SAHM at the time and we had a tiny income. As dd3 is so demanding, and you are so tir, he might agree.

Can someone translate LTB for me as I don't know (but maybe can guess)

I don't know if it will help but when teens do this I simply sweep things into a bin liner and stick it by the back door. If it's still there on bin day it goes out...

You need to hear the cries of rage when they rummage through it and discover their favourite dress/iPad/A level coursework mixed up with old apple cores, left over crusts, smelly socks and anything else that has been abandoned.

It does tend to work.

(pianos Mum sounds on the same page as me).

Hmmm...I think a grown adult should be allowed to leave a cup or a glass lying out in their own house without being bitched at tbh.

I mean...if he's an out and out slob then ok, I can understand your strength of feeling....but what you describe sounds pretty shrugworthy to me in the grand scheme of things.

Put it this way - if I went off to bed leaving my cup out, and got up the next day to dh carping about it (not that he would, but hypothetically)...I'd be pretty pissed off, and feel like I was being hounded in my own home. Tbh. And I'd be pretty vocal about it too!

Pictish OP is saying there are young 'exploring' babies that would smash a left glass by playing with it. That is a huge safety issue and irresponsible parenting.

My husband used to leave his used boxers on the floor before jumping into bed, and expect me to pick up after him. There would be a little pile after a few days and I asked him to put them in the bedroom laundry bin (which was a stones throw away from his little dumping pile), or I would do something drastic.

The next night he dumped his boxers on the floor again so I picked them up and flung them out of the bedroom window into the front garden where they got rained on all night long.

His boxers have miraculously found their way into the laundry bin from that moment on...

But I have the same problem with so many other areas - he leaves his highly toxic medication out on the side in the kitchen, leaves his clothes hanging round the kitchen, drapes wet kitchen towels all over the sofa, generally driving me mad with his slovenly ways!

But when I mention it to him he accuses me of 'nagging' and acts as though he is a hounded hen-pecked male to be pitied which does my head in to be quite honest

So OP you have my sympathy, I sadly think our men would quite happily fish through a box for their stuff, am really not sure it would bother then at all!

I haven't tried the black bin liner by the door waiting to go out to the wheelie bin within 24 hours, but could imagine the bin liner would get emptied and everything restored to its wrong place; shirts draped on kitchen chairs, tea towels on sofa, socks on floor etc. but I might try it though.

And I am so envious of the SAHM's whose partner's help them without asking- my husband won't even help when its obvious I can't (like post c section) and I do ask him to. He claims my threshold for cleaning is unreasonable and unnecessary when I ask him to change our bed and mop the kitchen floor once a week.

Mine seems to have improved his messy ways -this is what I did:

Had a chat during a good time about dangers to kids.
My mum highlighs news stories where kids get ciggarette lighters and burn down houses etc.
Explained that things need to go in designated places to find them easily and keep kids safe.
Created a small box that I put random crap items of his in so they are in a polka dot box not a messy pile.
He also has a cupboard other things go into.
If I move something he has left I pick it up and move it telling him where it is going - without getting angry "am just putting lighter on top of the fridge". He now jumps up and apologizes as this happens which is thankfully rarer.
Dirty laundry left about doesn't get washed but put in his spaces.

When baby gets something dangerous though I tend to go apesh** at him though. Maybe that got the point across.

We have little money so don't throw much out.

Have a friend that puts dirty socks back in his sock drawer etc.
Another uses a specific drawer for random husband mess.

It is similar to young kids really - reinforce and model what you want to happen, explaining as you go in a relaxed voice.
Husbands are just slower than kids and think they are entitled to be slobs.

oh god! so many of these stories sound like my DH. He leaves all his shit everywhere. Dirty socks in the middle of the lounge, wet towels in a heap on the bed, toilet roll cardboard just thrown on the floor in the bathroom right next to the bin. Our house looks like an explosion. He puts his drinks on the floor then kicks them over by accident and just leaves beer/coffee unless i am there and say 'well clean it up then' to which he huffs as if i'm a nag. He even told me that i basically have to stop nagging him to do stuff (ie asking him) otherwise our marriage is over. This is just what he's like and i have to accept it or leave.

He's absolutely happy scrabbling around in a heap of his stuff to find something, so that tactic doesn't work. He is also happy wearing clothes with stains on and smelling. So not doing laundry doesn't work either. He has always been like this, it is not new since i became a sahm.

He is the same with dangerous things left about for the 10mo baby to choke on. Coins, tic tacs and plastic rubbish are left everywhere, which ds puts straight in his mouth. I keep telling him how dangerous it is but everyday he acts like this is a new revelation or i am being ridiculous and 'bullying' him (apparently asking him to do stuff or telling him his clothes are covered in stains is bullying).

I've told him while he's like this i will never go back to work. As i wont do it all AND a full time job.

So no advice, just sympathies.

oh and i have put jars in every room for the coins and bits and a special basket in the hall for his keys, wallet etc. He still doesn't use them and loses them everyday and gets upset when i don't drop everything to find them for him.

My parents hate us visiting and get furious with him too because he does it in their house and that's him on best behaviour. My mum says she would have killed him by now.

I just pile up all the random husband crap and put it on his chair in his office. From there it's his choice what he does with it. This includes all unwashed cups, random keys, mountain biking gear etc. Into the office it goes!

Every man needs his own space in his home. Even just a designated husband-crap corner can work wonders.

Sadly no space for him to have his own corner of crap. Altho it if he did and i did that, it would mean all the plates, cups and glasses would disappear and he would just wear dirty clothes. So not so great for me really.