I stood up for my husband today

My husband and I have been married for five years and our third child was born three weeks ago. He's a great dad and very involved in all aspects of the kids' care. Obviously I'm spending the most time with our newborn baby, but he's been helping with anything he can, including diaper changes, rocking her in the middle of the night, and starting her on the bottle.We are very fortunate that my mom is staying with us to help while I recover and we get acclimated to having three kids. She is so helpful and caring, but she is also old-school and constantly makes mildly passive-aggressive comments as a means of getting her way. For example, she insists I eat specially prepared foods to make sure I produce plenty of breast milk and that the baby doesn't get too gassy for the first month. I'm not saying it works, but it's her family tradition going back generations and I'm fine going along with it for a few weeks. But she does nag me about it all the time, and if I forget to eat something she made, or have a little bit of something outside her list of foods, she makes endless comments about the baby spitting up too much. Sometimes it feels like death by a thousand paper cuts.Basically, she is obsessed with making sure the baby is getting enough milk. And even when the doctor is happy with the baby's weight gain, that's not good enough for my mom. If the baby is fussy, it's because she's hungry. If she's not sleeping well at night, it's because she's hungry. You get the idea.Yesterday, I gave my husband a bottle with half an ounce of expressed milk to give to the baby. We had been doing a small bottle everyday for the past week to acclimate her to the bottle. Most days my husband gives her the bottle, but my mom also does it occasionally. After about 15 minutes of trying with the bottle, my husband came back to report that the baby only drank about half the milk. I chalked it up to the fact that she wasn't that hungry since she had been taking the bottle no problem the whole week. Obviously, not something that my mom would ever agree with.Today, my mom gave the baby her bottle because my husband had gone into the office. The baby drank all the milk and still seemed hungry afterwards, so I started to feed her. My mom held up the empty bottle and said that if you know how to hold a bottle properly, the baby would always finish the milk. She went on to make a comment that men don't know hold a bottle and that's why the baby didn't finish the milk yesterday.Now, I have a fairly high tolerance for my mom's little comments. I'm used her trying to find a reason to blame someone (including herself) if things don't go the way she wants. This is true even when there's no one to blame for a situation, or even when there's nothing actually wrong except in her sometimes unreasonable opinion.But something about her criticizing my husband's ability to hold a bottle just because he's a man really annoyed me. I just couldn't bite my tongue about it. I told her that the idea my husband couldn't hold a bottle because he was a man was ridiculous. I reminded her that he had no problem holding the baby's bottle the first five times, not to mention giving our other kids bottles when they were babies. She immediately backtracked and said I was taking her comment too seriously. But I didn't let her off the hook. She could see I was still annoyed so she apologized and even praised how much my husband does for the kids.After she left, I was conflicted about making my mom feel bad about what she said. She does so much for me and my family. And we don't do a lot of direct conflict in my family. That whole passive-aggressive thing is par for the course. But I was also glad I stuck up for my husband, even if it was just to my mom. via /r/Parenting http://ift.tt/2HYq2iu