My [26M] Children Behave Perfectly Around Me, But When They're Around Both My Wife [27F] and I, They Act Out Horribly

Hello there everyone.For a bit of background, I have four boys. Age three, five, five (twins), and seven.Her and I both suffer from (different) autoimmune diseases. I suffer from rheumatoid arthritis, but she has Hashimoto's. On top of that, she has anxiety which can make it hard for her to go to sleep.Our morning arrangement is that I get up with the three younger ones at about 5:45 AM, when they usually wake up (older kid is well-mannered and gets up around 7:00 AM and just lives his day with no issues). I make them breakfast, we play, we do at-home speech therapy, and I work in my home office for a while while they play.She gets up a little bit later. Sometimes it's 10:00 AM, sometimes upwards of 11:00 AM. She wakes up exhausted, and I don't know what that's like.But when she does get up for the day, my kids go from being respectful and non-combative to absolute train wrecks. They talk back, they insult each other, and they start getting territorial over toys.My day kind of goes downhill when she gets up as well, because I know she's exhausted and grumpy as a result. She does her best to work on being personable when she gets up, but the mood shifts.Then we hit the magical time of day where I close my office door and get to work. They fight. They lose privileges because they respond with these vein-popping screams when they talk.This afternoon was pretty rough. It's 5:00 PM right now when I'm posting this. At 4:25 PM, they were being terrible. I took them outside and she stayed in, and we just played in the yard for a half-hour before it started getting dark.Now my good boys are back. They listened the whole time, they went in without a fight when I told them we had to go in, and they were good to each other the whole time. We had fun.I am stricter with them. Without fighting, if they act a way that they know they're not allowed to act (high-pitched screaming, hitting each other), then they go straight to time out. No warnings, no counting to three, they just go right to time out.As a result, they rarely bicker. They're kids; they fight sometimes, I see what the issue is and teach them how to resolve it, and the world keeps spinning, but when she gets up for the day they throw all those mechanisms I've taught them out the window.What is the issue? Is it that they don't feel like they can act out their emotions around me (that whole thing about mothers being an emotional safe space), or that they have no respect for her and act out? Lately she has a short fuse and I have to tell her to take a ten minute break or a fifteen minute walk or something to calm down, and I'm wondering if that's what it is.Just looking for an outside perspective on the matter since it's really starting to affect our family.TL;DR: Kids act kind and generally good with me, when my wife gets up for the day, they screech, talk back, yell and act very bad. Looking for an outside perspective on the matter to help.Edit: Spelling. via /r/Parenting https://ift.tt/353XLBn