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[quote=Anonymous]My sister and brother in law are on vacation and staying in our house for the week. They have 3 kids-6, 4, and 2. I’ve never spent this much time with them and am for the first time seeing their parenting up close. 
I know better than to offer advice. My question is more how do I avoid having their misery at their situation not affect me when they are in my house.

They quick summary is-they seem very unhappy. They are drowning. They make a lot of parenting choices that seem to make their lives very hard, but it’s like they are completely resigned to the misery and just trudging through with their heads down. I try to offer to help-not with advice but with just doing whatever they ask, and they hand over very small things but the load is too massive for it to help much.

Here’s some examples:
-they only eat whole, unprocessed, organic foods, including while on vacation. So no ordering pizza and I can’t even make spaghetti because my sister needs control over their food. Yesterday they went out for an activity in the morning and got back late. Her kids were melting down and sis is making this elaborate meal that entails a ton of chopping....in my kitchen which she doesn’t know. I jumped in and helped but was doing it all wrong, she had a very specific vision for this meal and I didn’t get it (quesadillas made with chickpeas....??)

-they have a lot of special water and milk bottles that can only be hand washed, and they use at least 5 each per day per family member (only one use allowed)....it’s just a lot of dishes

-they all cosleep in the same room (at home and here), but it’s an epic disaster every single night. None of them ever sleeps more than an hour or two at a time and every time one person is up, it wakes the others

-no one has ever been alone with their kids. They’ve never had an hour of childcare and say it’s because their kids “won’t accept it”.

Oh and my sis is pregnant too. I believe in the idea-whatever works for your family is what you should do and it’s not going to be universal. But their misery/despair is palpable and it’s so hard to see. They say things have actually been going a little more smoothly on this trip than at home, surprisingly since to me things seem to be going so badly.

How do I just not care? My sis was complaining about how exhausted she is and I just kept saying, yes it’s so hard, oh that’s so tough, oh wow that would be very frustrating (but in the back of my mind I’m like OMG why do you make these choices??).

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