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[quote=Anonymous]We are visiting the in-laws for the holidays.  I love them, but they're really terrible grandparents.  I feel like their heart is in the right place, but I no longer will leave them with the grandparents unless my husband or I is present.  The last time we visited them, my eldest was a baby.  My MIL gave him multiple choking hazards to play with (like AAA batteries!), tried to feed him some peanut butter (just to make sure he was really allergic- thankfully I was in the room finishing some work and could remove the peanut butter M&M out of his mouth.  The only time I left him alone in her care I found my son at the top of the steep staircase when we came home.  She claimed that she 'got distracted' and ran upstairs to finish a phone call.  My FIL is just as bad in a different way.  My kids barely know them because they rarely visit us, never call us, and expect us to do all the legwork to keep in touch.  My FIL expects my children to jump into his arms when they see him, behave impeccably, wake up at 10am, nap for 3 hours, and go to sleep at 4pm.  I know it sounds like my inlaws don't want a relationship, but they claim they do.  They insisted we visit them this Christmas, so we are sacrificing our only family vacation of the year to see them.

The big issue I'm having is with my husband.  My inlaws have told him several times that they want to spend one on one time with the kids to "give us a break", but I am seriously against that.  The last time we saw them (they visited us as they had a business trip in the area), they wanted to go to the Smithsonian for two hours.  In that span of time, they fed my 1 year old daughter a dog biscuit (for real) because 'it was the only thing I had in my purse, and I figured what the heck?" (I had given them a bag of snacks, lunches, diapers, and spare clothes that they never opened and likely left in the car), lost my son in a museum (!!!), and "forgot" to feed the kids.  They were also angry when my son had an accident.  Later my son told me he had told them many times that he needed to use the bathroom, but was told that he could "later".  They never changed my daughter's poopy diaper either.  They rolled in 4 hours after we had agreed they would come back, without having answered any of my husband's anxious phone calls.  "sorry we were late - we lost your son!  Oh and he's wet because he peed all over his booster seat.  They're really cranky!  We're going back to the hotel because this was exhausting.  Bye!"

I think that for whatever reason they just aren't used to kids.  They weren't very good parents either, according to my husband and his siblings. However, they keep trying to spend time alone with my kids.  The last time they were here, when they lost my son and fed my daughter dog biscuits, we agreed that they were far to irresponsible to watch the kids. But since then some time has passed, and my husband has convinced himself that the parents are trustworthy again.  It is true that they will no longer try giving my son peanut butter, but otherwise nothing else has changed.  They're still the same hippy-dippy morons who think that dog food = people food and babies should be "Free to roam".  My son is too timid to help them, and my daughter is a handful.

Any ideas on how I could gently tell my husband that we are not letting my in-laws near the kids without one of us present?  I don't want to sound nasty or insult them, but they are not qualified to care for the children at all.  Sorry for the novel![/quote]

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