to think that with three young children a father should make every possible effort to be home for bedtime/bath time

[emkana]

ie if he chooses to do other activities like exercise he should aim to do those after the children have been cared for.

Work commitments are exempt.

9 times out of 10 yes I agree - if he gets a night off, he reciprocates for the mum

All about give n take, innit

Perfectly reasonable imo

I count the minutes till DP walks through the door and takes DD up for her bath!

agree
his time is not his own until they;re in bed imo, mostly anyway.

Yes, I do kind of agree that work commitments are exempt, but what if that means that dh is only there during weekend to do bed and bath? (and sometimes only one day of the weekend at that!)
I def. agree that they should do things like exercise in 'kids asleep' time if at all possible.

Absolutely. Once they are settled he can go to the gym/for a run. Until then he should be supporting you.

Yes. Why, where is he??

My DH now gets up earlier to go to the gym before work.

He is often entertaing clients or in USA, so, when he is able I demand like him to be here to kiss the DC goodnight.

YANBU BTW

Message withdrawn

in an ideal world yes.
but when people are involved in team sports it is not up to them when training is, so if it clashes with childrens bed time they are screwed by your logic.
where achievable then yes i agree wiyth you. when an activity clashes then i think that it should be reciprocated with the mother having the next night off to do her own thing

YANBU - I leave at 7.10am and am back by 5pm.

If I had the inclination I would arrange things for after they were in bed. If nothing was available for these times I wouldn't do it.

The dc come first.

Depends how often it is.
If like mayor says, team sports, dh doesn't do it on a .... thursday becasue he goes to ..... football/squash/whatever, then that is fine.

DH and I have almost always worked on the basis that one night a week, one of us will not be home for bathtime bedtime. So he does one night along, and I do one night alone.

This means we both have the opportunity to meet friends, go to the gym, cinema or any other thing that we enjoy doing separately from the family. It might also be work related.

Now and again we go through spells of it being more than one night each, but we are both fairly reasonable people and know that if one person has been doing more than their share of evenings, then that needs to be made up for.

I think time for us to spend adult time every now and again is important to our sanity - for that reason we work as a team to make sure we both get our chance of it!