Sorry this is a long post there's a TL;DR summary at the bottom. Fellow parents could you share your thoughts with me about my Mother In-Laws complaints please? I'd take some advice too if you feel so inclined. So first a bit about my family, I'm 26 married to my wife of 24 with a 2 year old (29 months) son. We live in a nice 3 bedroom home (mortgage) that we pay around a thousand a month for. My wife is a stay at home mom and I'm the only working parent. My job: I work a later shift 4:30pm-1am because any time after 6pm gets a $1.05 an hour pay increase. At 32.5 hours a week of said extra pay it adds up to around $150 a month extra which we use to help make ends meet. Story Time: My mother in law has always hated that I work a night shift. I used to get off at 2:30 am and be home by 3am but I decided to try to push my schedule back so that I got home around 2 hours early. The goal was to get to bed sooner so that we could wake up earlier because Grandma insists on it. This worked great for a while but lately there's been lots of increased workload at work and I get called to a mandatory 10 hour shift rather than my usual 8 hours. Thus resulting in my arriving home by around 3:15-3:30am. This perhaps on it's own wouldn't be so bad but the problem arises from the fact that my Wife likes to be awake to see me for a few minutes before bed when I get home. Our 2 year old always liked coming to give me a hug when I got home from work which is part of why I changed to an earlier shift. But with this almost daily overtime he tries to stay up later and as a result he is sometimes up until 3:30ish before I come home and help get him into bed. Our weird work schedule has us currently attempting to make sure the kid is in bed no later than 2am with an hour or two nap earlier in the evening. He always gets to eat something an hour or two before bed so he won't be starving in the morning. But sometimes we're getting to bed between 3:30-4am and we wake up around 10:30-11am to make sure our sone gets up and is fed breakfast. Before the overtime we were having him in bed by 1:30am at the latest and up between 8:30-9am. This shift towards going to sleep later and getting up later has his Grandma (my mother in law) in a tizzy about how irresponsible we are for not having him in bed by 9 or 10 pm and up by 8 or 9 am. This was accentuated recently because our son got a bad cold that lead to him waking up from an afternoon nap at 4pm with croup and stridor (trouble breathing, raspy noisy breaths). When this happened we rushed him to the E.R. where he was put on oxygen and medicine and watched overnight. He was taken care of and is now doing much better! But the fact that he got sick and ended up in the E.R. overnight has my Mother In Law accusing us of being bad parents 'because we don't have an early enough schedule, and we aren't feeding him at proper meal times like "good parents" (it should be noted he gets 3-4 full meals a day and plenty of snacks too)' Our son is doing much better and is his usual happy self running around with his chubby tummy happy as can be. This is the first time he's been sick in over a year. But my mother in law has started calling us 3 to 5 times a week at 8 to 9 am to "make sure we are awake". She has also come over at least 3 times recently to ring the door bell insistently until we answer also around 9am. My wife got her and the kid in bed by 11:30pm today while I was at work so every once and a while she manages to convince him to go to bed before I come home. I can't really do much about the current overtime but I've been told it should lighten up potentially a lot in April once they have some automation software updated. I can't just quit my job either as I've been there 3 years and I need the job stability and the money it pays to keep our house. What do you fellow parents think? Are we terrible parents for having a delayed schedule? With the way we've been doing things it allows for us to all 3 be awake and interacting together so that our little boy gets time with both parents and my wife also gets time with me. Should I take my Mother in Law's complaints seriously or should I just let them pass for now because this situation should be temporary? TL;DR: My whole family sometimes goes to bed around 3am and wakes up around 11 am due to temporary late work shift. My kid got sick and stayed 1 night in the ER and now Grandma/MIL insists that our late schedule is proof that we are bad parents and not taking proper care of our son. She calls or comes to our house to wake us up at 9am 3 to 5 times a week so that we can be 'good parents'. Are we bad parents or is she crazy? Advice? via /r/Parenting http://ift.tt/2FGqqEx
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