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[quote=Anonymous]My inlaws live across the country.  They travel very frequently for work, and often just for pleasure.  They visit here around once a year.  Otherwise, they rarely call or contact us in any way.  My FIL has Asperger's (or HFA if you prefer).  I understand that they have a lot of problems reading social cues, but it's incredibly frustrating dealing with them.  I have three young children (5, 3, and 1), and we don't have a ton of money to fly all five of us across the country (well 4 if we don't mind holding our youngest in our laps for 8 hours).

My biggest problem with visiting them is that my FIL has this incredibly irritating "father knows best" attitude that makes me want to scream.  He was a terrible father according to my husband and in-laws, but he is CONSTANTLY showering me with advice.  Primarily he doesn't believe that women should work outside the home (I work part-time), he does not believe that we should have moved to DC and instead should be nearby, and he is constantly acting like my children are going to die a grisly death from things like letting my 5 year old walk upstairs by himself to use the bathroom (he thinks we should hold on to the chair the entire time our kids are eating dinner in case the three and five year old spontaneously fall out of it.).  My MIL is okay, but she is very shy, doesn't make eye contact, and is clearly counting the minutes until the kids are in bed asleep and she can have a glass of wine in her hand.  They're constantly giving us grief about our kids' diet (They are not going to drink fermented apple-kale juice, sorry), and clearly judging our parenting skills on a constant basis. My FIL has said things to me like "it's good that you take the children to museums, this helps their brains grow!".  I let all of this slide, attributing a lot of it to his HFA, age, and general insanity.

Visiting them is also strange because they always try to avoid being with us as much as possible.  They want their photos, 15 minutes of floor play, and then they're off without even telling us.  It is incredibly frustrating to hang out in their cramped and dirty house (God FORBID we go to a hotel), only to be left hanging all the time.  In the extremely rare instance when they do things with us, it's entirely of their choosing.  They took my kids (and I, they're never, ever alone with them) to FIL's office to admire it from the car.  My FIL was angry when DS asked to go have dinner since he was hungry and "tired of looking at a building".  Essentially, it's an expensive and terrible trip we all hate.  My husband decided that we would not visit them until the kids were much older since it is an awful trip for all of us, and my inlaws make no effort to spend time with us despite the effort and expense it takes us to go to their house.

Well, despite it being less than two months since our last horrible trip, they're once again making demands that we visit.  I'm tempted to flat out say that the last trip was difficult and expensive (I'll sugarcoat this a bit), and maybe we should meet somewhere in the middle?  I seriously dislike FIL and MIL, but I have kept my feelings to myself (Even DH doesn't know).  I honestly cannot go through another dreadful trip like the one we took last year.  When they visit us it's still pretty bad, but at least we didn't have to take a multi-stop flight to the west coast then drive 3 hours while spending thousands.  Plus, my in laws don't want to spend too much time with my kids as it is because they "don't know what to do".

Anyone been there done that?  Anyone ever tell in-laws (nicely) that visits will be limited from now on?  I realize DH should be the one to say something, but he's non-confrontational.  [/quote]

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