To not be able to cope with all the extra curricular activities, days out etc?

[busymum2017]

Long time lurker but first post so be gentle with me.

I’m completely exhausted and need help!

A bit of background, I am married with three girls age 4, 5 and 7 and I work as a teaching assistant. My girls just asked me tonight if they could join rainbows/brownies tonight and I said no because I just don’t feel like I can cope with any more running around than I already do. They have gone to bed crying and I feel awful :(

I don’t know if I’m just pathetic but I feel like I’m struggling as it is, I feel like I am just rushing through their childhoods with no time to enjoy it. I will post an example of my week and if anyone can give me any pointers that I can’t see to help free up some time so I don’t feel so exhausted that would be great! Or maybe I’m moaning about nothing and this is what life with children is like?

Mon: work 8am - 3pm (girls go to breakfast club). School finished 3.15 home by 3.45. Make snacks and drinks, sort and pack away clean washing, cook dinner, make packed lunches, clean up from dinner, upstairs for baths, stories, spellings, times tables, everyone in bed by 8pm. Go and do a 20 minute exercise video (as advised by doctor I am overweight and un fit and my health is at risk) empty bins, then bath and collapse infront of tv/mumsnet for one hour then go to bed.
Tue: repeat above except I work until 4.30 home at 5pm (girls go to after school club) and I do not sort the washing. Clean loos instead of empty bins at night.
Wed: work 8am-3pm, go to gymnastics straight from school where each girls class is at a different time due to abilities, we get home at 7pm (girls eat in cafe I can’t afford too as well) baths etc everyone in bed by 8.30, then I cook clean up, iron uniforms, empty bins, too tired for any exercise and collapse.
Thur: repeat above but replace gymnastics with swimming and cafe food with happy meals.
Fri: work 8-3, come straight home after school, tidy messy house with colours papers jigsaws etc everywhere, dinner, clean up, baths etc then collapse In front of tv and fall asleep as so tired from the week.
Sat: take oldest to musical theatre for the morning then I go to the supermarket with younger dc. Come home make lunch pack shopping away, then do something nice with the girls like cinema, park, visit a relative etc for a couple of hours, come home, cook clean up bedtimes etc
Sun: clean house takes 3 hours, washloads, ironing, homework, cook roast, clean up, baths bed etc sit on sofa and think Sunday was worse than a week day :(

My dh works nights including weekends he has Mondays and Tuesdays off instead. He does garden, car stuff, family admin and bills, diy, decorating plus ebays our old stuff and takes over time at work if it’s available.

I want to study for an extra qualification but just can’t see how I could fit that in :(

6 weeks holidays are fine and I feel like I’m relaxed in those 6 weeks but the one week and two week holidays we catch up with relatives, old friends, school friends etc. I try and keep one day a week in the hols free but this week a friend who I have not seen for 2 years wants to meet up so that’s my one free day gone where I wanted to go and buy new bins for bathrooms new toilet brushes as our bathrooms are looking grim, girls winter shoes etc so now I will have to do that one night after school making yet another rushed night.

How can we slow down and enjoy life instead of constantly rushing here and there? Or is everyone else the same? Or probably worse and will tell me I’m lucky I don’t work full time?

P.s. Busymum17 you will probably be on a higher band as you have to attend to their wet beds in the middle of the night as well.

OK, here are my pointers for you:

1. Your DH needs to do more cleaning and taking more responsibilities for children's activities/school preparations.

1. On Weds and Thursdays, the children can have a school dinner - that way they have had a hot meal at school and you can save the packed lunch for teatime instead of a cafe/McDonalds meal.

1. School uniforms do not need ironing. Fold/hang them straight out of the drier and they will be fine. Stop ironing.

1. You seem to be doing an awful lot of cleaning considering everyone is out most of the day. Surely a quick run round with the hoover and wiping down kitchen is sufficient during the week?

1. Your children need to help out. You are not their slave. My children (9, 8, 5) have been putting their own clean/folded laundry away for years. They also have dedicated jobs: emptying the dishwasher in the morning (eldest), feeding/watering the cat and loading breakfast things into dishwasher (middle child) and the youngest puts the clean cutlery away, fills the water bottles and gets everyone's school things out (coats/bags/shoes/instruments etc) ready to leave the house.

1. On Mondays your DH should do the homework and bedtime routine with the kids, ditto for Tuesdays. Say he has the option of chauffeur duties or bedtime duties. Not fair for you to be doing both.

1. Online food shopping will save you an enormous amount of time and energy. You and your DH can put it away together.

If your husband thinks that Monday and Tuesday are his days off then you tell him that Saturday and Sunday are your days off and that you won't be doing anything on those days. See what he says to that.

Op, does the chlorine in the swimming pool irritate your DC's eczema and psoriasis? Perhaps swimming is an activity that could be stopped until their skin improves once they are all staying dry at night.

I agree with pp saying that your DH needs to do more as he sounds useless and quite nasty.

Just say no. They do plenty already. Or say when you start helping out, then mummy might have more time.

Hi MyDcAreMarvel. We make a team here! Thing is, if she gets Dla she will be able to afford a cleaner, online shopping etc. It's ok people telling her to sort out her Lazy Arse Husband but she has enough on her plate without the stress of arguing with him. Dla will help her massively!

Yes, I hope the op claims , and like you say puts down every last detail on the form.

If your girls want to go to rainbows it does seem a bit mean to say no. But perhaps they will have to drop another activity. I agree your DH doesn't seem to be doing much in the way of helping towards the running of the household. I also thought you were a lone parent as you seem to be doing absolutely everything and working almost full-time hours as well.

I had 3 dcs , but dh worked away from home mon -Friday, miles to come home at weekends
I worked 20 hrs / week , dcs went to after school Mon, Wed, fri
Mon beavers 6.30-8
Tues swimming training 7-8.30
Wed night off!
Thurs Orchestra, brownies/Guides4-8 Mac Donald's for tea, don't judge me
Fri Swim club 7-9
Sat swimming lesson 10-11
Sun Swim lesson 8-9, swim club 7-9
I carried this on for about 8 years until dds gave up Swim club puberty struck this was then replace by karate for ds
They loved their activities and it got me out of house( so no time to get messy!- I'd do shopping on a Friday while they were at swimming club!) and I met people while I was mooching around not enough time to go home
I do kind of miss those full on days, but I'm 53 now , work 30 hrs week , husband now works from home and but all dcs have left home ....and it's very quiet... thinking of getting a dog

I have a DH like yours. Can't win the argument about weight pulling around the home. There's always an excuse!
So....my solution is I don't work full time. If I'm expected to do 3 jobs (work part time, bring up the kids practically single-handedly AND do 95% of the running of the home) then I'm not doing paid work fulltime! I need a day or two off a week to myself.
Any chance you can cut down on working one day a week?
I also stopped doing DH's washing, only cook for him once a week (he eats at work for free) and I never iron. If your little ones are still wetting the bed, regularly then consider pyjama pants until they are reliably dry. It is not uncommon at that age. Tell the kids that if they want to do Brownies then they need to stop doing one other activity.

Just seen your post about the pull ups!
Apply for DL. Use the Cerebra website and ask CAB to help to you fill it out. Include the time it takes you to persuade them to get in the bath, put their cream on, get them back off to sleep in the middle of the night etc.

I think you need to have a think about what’s important and needs done each day. To me spending time together and you getting some time to exercise due to your health concerns are the big things. So they’re the priorities.
Can you go for bike rides on the weekend with the children? Have a dance party a few nights a week. Thoose kind of things tick both boxes.
Cut down on the cleaning and definitely internet shop. An hour or two a day should keep an average house clean and reasonably tidy so no need for a big 3 hour clean at the weekend. We’ve cut way back on the amount of stuff we have in the house which makes it easier to keep on top of it.
But the big thing is that everything is much easier when my husband and I are getting on. If you resent each other then life can feel really negative in all areas. I don’t know if you get much time together? Or if you want to?

Online shop. Clean the house once per week. Get a bigger bin.

I actually find it is more relaxing and quicker to go down the launderette with a weekly wash. I load everything into the machines then get about 40 minutes to konk out in the car
Fold everything from the tumble dryers and you don't need to iron anything.
You can even sort it into everyone's basket/bag and just dump it into the relevant room when you get back.

Between dd and ds's activities we always ate in the car. Picked dc up at 3.50 and rarely got home till 9am. Monday-Friday
Spent Saturday at a MT school from 10 -6. Had a great time chatting to everyone. Then Sunday another 3 hours at other dance or drama or fencing or gymnastics lessons.
I did that from when dd was 4 years old and although she has scaled back things she is still doing activities daily if she is not working. (teaching the activities)
In that time dp was never at home as he flies all over the world and I had my own business.

I have 3 dds, one of them with SEN. They are all grown up now.

I feel like I am just rushing through their childhoods with no time to enjoy it

That's exactly what I did. And I do so really regret it. One to a piano lesson, another to Rainbow guides, my SEN dd to a Scope after school club - then the next day, dancing class ballet for the youngest at 6pm, jazz for the middle one at 6.30pm (same place, fortunately) whilst I sat in the car with my SEN daughter as there was no point going home because we would have had to turn straight around to go back and collect them. Friday night there was a club for children with LD which I felt strongly that dd3 would benefit from but, again,
it lasted only an hour and it was in rush hour traffic time so if I'd actually gone home I would have been too late to turn around and pick her up. So we all sat in the car and waited.
And so on and so on. Every week night.
My dh worked away all week in 'that London'' so I was on my own with it anyway. I could only do it because I have a car and I can drive.
Activities nowadays are a lot less 'local' than when I was a child.
In retrospect, we would have all benefited far more by just staying home, relaxing, bonding, and making some valuable family fun of our own. Baking a cake. Making artwork (i.e. drawing pictures). Making a game of tidying up. Playing board games (for a limited period!)
Just hanging out together. Much like my own childhood (I'm pushing 60) when there was nothing like the pressure that there is nowadays to be 'doing something' all the live long day. Also, there wasn't the cash available either, for dancing or piano lessons. I was in the Brownies from 7, but it was walking distance and I walked there on my own or with friends. Nobody had a car so everything you did had to be local or you didn't do it. Sunday morning, age 10, I met my mates and went swimming at the local pool 15 minutes walk away.
Parents were a lot less pressured to entertain their children because children had far more autonomy when I was a child than they do now.
I don't think our parents were bad parents, or careless, but we didn't have the immediate internet access to bad news scenarios that we do now. Bad things happen, but rarely. We had much more freedom, so we got smarter quicker.
I spent hours and weeks and years driving my kids around to choir practises, orchestra practises, brownies, rainbow guides, but most of all fecking dancing lessons.

Two of my dds are now software engineers, and the third is still LD,
I'm pretty sure that we could have made more of our leisure time than driving around from one dancing/music lesson to another, as neither of them are a dancer/musician.
We could have danced around to music at home, with the same result. But in an infinitely more relaxed and enjoyable way.

Been there done that with Eczema, thankfully it's under control/seems to have grown out of it (hopefully forever). Has your GP referred you to a dietician for your DDs? Also have you tried cloth nappies for night time? You can get pull up ones that have snaps on the sides, the inside is lined with either hemp/bamboo fleece (which also has antibacterial properties) or polyester fleece which keeps wetness away from their skin. Iirc a couple Wahm make some Snuggleblanks and Weenotions. If you want drop me a pm as there's cloth nappy fb groups I could point you in the direction of as they're a lot more knowledgeable than me

thatwouldbeanecumenicalmatter

Think you might be on the wrong thread. Having said that, having a 25 year old doubly incontinent dd, some of what you've said is helpful.

I did not RTFT. Soz.

I agree with rosiebucket, hit the bloody activites on the head. Hang out at home instead. The kids will be knackered from school as it is.

Your DH needs to be batch cooking on Monday and Tuesday, he could basically do a week's worth of meals in that time. Not that complicated.

As a pp said, if your DH won't change, reduce your hours.

Your workload is relentless and he obviously doesn't give a shit.

Op have you claimed and been refused or not claimed. Creaming like you describe with bedwetting should qualify for low rate care

I don't think so. That's not even low rate care. That's simply what a responsible parent should do, without claiming from the fecking state! The government should pay for everybody who has skin problems??? That would include me, big time, and a whole load of people I know.

Unless it's a 25 year old LD 'child' we're talking about ( and I have a 25 year old 'child' with manifold problems) then you would be taking the piss out of the rest of us who don't expect to be paid for our 'children' having eczema. It's a thing that happens. You can't charge the taxpayer for it.

As the mother of a severely mentally disabled 30 year old daughter, and I am heavily involved with learning disability support, to both physically and cognitively challenged disabled people, and am fully conversant with the benefits available, and I commit my time and energy to give unpaid support to anyone who needs it - to
those people who have adult 'children' who they care for at home.
Without any government handouts. I am absolutely gutted to read this.

Creaming like you describe with bedwetting should qualify for low rate care

That's what we're up against. Just normal looking after your normal kids stuff. They have a bit of eczema. So let's claim money from the state. Let's just see how much cash we can milk out of the state.
Let's claim that bit of money.

And then people like my 30 year old daughter, who is non-verbal, and
has very severe learning disability has to live a life that is dependent on how much cash the local authority has to spend on her. And I don't claim for her sore bum.

The cash is limited because of people like you. . You can claim for your small children having a skin condition that is fairly common, and which almost always resolves.

You have a child with skin problems. And somebody on here thinks that qualifies you for low rate care.

I have news for you. My dd has no speech, cannot walk unaided,and still does not qualify for low rate care.

I realise that in my posts I've said that my dd was 25. and then said she was 30. She is in fact 30. I just fiddled numbers because I idiotically felt that I should hide the facts. That somebody would discover my post and out me. I

Noticed that you seem to ‘collapse infront of tv’ a lot, have you tried discussing being constantly tired to your doctor? You might be low on vitamin D/B or something else, and they can give you a vitamin shot/vitamin pills which would help to uplift your mood and energy if you are deficient.

Aside from that, I don’t think your life is hectic tbh. You work, have kids, drive around etc sounds normal really, most of the ‘tasks’ you have listed are just mundane every day things that we all do. Going forward, you are obviously overwhelmed, and you need to talk to your husband about pulling his weight more. His laziness and messy habits are rubbing off on your kids - it will only get worse in the future. I would tell your girls that they have to start tidying up after themselves if they want to go to new clubs and if see if they improve first

I have worked night shifts before, and regular 11pm finishes and I think your husband is exaggerating his ‘need’ for his precious days off. Yes, you are ridiculously tired after you finish your shift, almost nodding off on the journey home but you eventually get used to it and your body clock adjusts surely? You can’t spend your days off moping around and not being productive forever....especially if hes contracted as working nights and it’s not a one off. He’s still part of the household and contributing heavily to the mess.

Creaming like you describe with bedwetting should qualify for low rate care

You won't easily get a payout for a bedwetting child.
There's not enough money in the whole world for that,
And nor should there be. It's happened for time immemorial.
Kids pee their beds sometimes.
Nor putting cream on. . Because putting a bit of cream on is the obvious thing a caring parent would do, if cream is available. There are many countries in the world where creams are not available.

It really pisses me off that, instead of managing their problems, people just try to claim money from the government.

Child has nappy rash = claim some money
Even better. Claim a regular income because child had eczema.
Oh dear. Cant be done. Country will go bust. Too bloody many people taking out.