Family life feels hard

[lking12]

Not sure why I made this an AIBU! But we have three daughters aged 5, 2 and 10 months and just finding it hard at the moment.
I’m back at work and trying to express milk but supply has dropped so baby having formula in the day (this is fine but want her to have some breastmilk until she was 1 like the others had)! Baby and toddler not sleeping through but quick to resettle.
The 2 year old wants to do everything for herself and we spend 75% of our time telling her off to not write on walls/hit her sister/ get changed again/mess around in the toilet etc etc. Though our 5 year old is easy and sweet most of the time.
I want to lose weight and get fit but when? I’m exhausted.
I feel a lot better with a nice clean house but it never stays tidy.
My husband and I are hanging in there, we don’t really laugh anymore, there are lots of frustrations around kids, chores, work, etc.
Our summer holiday was one big stress of packing our whole house, entertaining the kids, getting too tired ourselves. Etc. we came home a day early.

I just don’t feel that happy at the moment which makes me anxious as time feels like it’s going faster.

Any tips? Does it get better? I’m glad we had our third baby but oooof nearly 6 years of babies and I’m bloody knackered.

yabu- don’t worry it gets better
yanbu- this is pretty much how it goes

Oh, and MIL had no car either so had to drag all the kids on foot to the laundrette to wash all those shitty cloth nappies. I'm sure she would have loved a car to be rushing about in.

The stuff that’s slipping is obviously the house and any time to myself for anything other than basic hygiene! We don’t have expensive holidays or a new car at the moment! And basically I’ve unfollowed everyone on Instagram whose 5 bed house with kitchen island, large garden etc is show home perfect.

Keeping the house relatively tidy and the kids alive is kind of my routine at the minute. I will drop expressing in 8 weeks when baby can have cows milk but I want to give her the same start as the other two who I fed to 1 year. (By the way I find formula a massive faff anyway!).

I don’t want to miss the baby stuff, even clearing out all the newborn things was sad but yeah just find it tough.
unfortunately.

bedtimes are actually our quality time at the moment I generally do the baby and the 5 year old and my husband does the toddler. We go through our days and read a story (with the 5 yr old anyway!).

career breaks, leave, reduced hours, aren’t feasible given our outgoings and how costly everything is and there’s not an obvious area to cut down say 20% of our costs…. Which is what it’d be salary wise for a 4 day week. Compressed hours don’t work either.
Our childcare costs are £1600 a month at the moment and our take home is more each, so it doesn’t make sense to stop work even if we could afford to.

I think living away from family is an issue too, I’m from the North and moved down South. My husbands family are an hour away but I find in laws stressful and fussy! They will babysit a bit for us but not the baby.

We’ll get there just hoping best is yet to come!!

It really does get easier as they get older in terms of the unavoidable work and stresses of managing young children. You get new challenges but they tend to be more emotional or not quite so urgent time wise so it’s easier to cope with. I’d much rather “worry” about a teen who’s out an hour late than spend a day cleaning up after a vomiting toddler.