Reply to Is my wife being unrealistic about her expectations of my work life balance?

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Reply to "Is my wife being unrealistic about her expectations of my work life balance?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]You’re both wrong. If you have a hard stop at 5, you need to stop at 5, JUST LIKE EVERY MOM IN THE WORLD WHO WORKS AND DOES DAYCARE PICK UP. Why is that hard to understand?[/quote]

I sympathize with OP but I do agree with this part. Both my husband and I have been responsible for leaving work at a particular time to get our kids and there is no gray area there. You log off when you need to and go get your kids.

Now we both work from home, so while our agreement is that we all meet with the kids in the kitchen at 5:30 to make dinner and feed the dogs if everyone is at home (our kids are older now), one of us not showing up for that isn't that big of a deal so we're pretty understanding if something came up. But picking kids up from daycare is no joke and you don't have the room to be 5-10 minutes late. If I were you, I would apologize for that and make a bigger effort going forward. [b]Her taking the 3-month old isn't an option[/b] - that's a lot of work to get the baby ready and in the car - so you need to honor your commitment to a 5 pm stop time even if it means you do log on later.[/quote]

It absolutely is. Parents do it every day. She (and apparently you) don’t want to do it, but it is indeed an option.[/quote]

It's not an option if she needs to leave at 5 to make it to daycare before it closes and doesn't have the baby ready to go. If she KNEW she had to take the baby, she could plan ahead for that. If she didn't and wasn't planning to, the baby could be asleep, etc. Clearly you've never had a hard deadline to pick up a kid in the DC area. [/quote]

She does not need to leave at 5 to get there before they close. She likes to pick the 4 year old up at a consistent time. Totally different. That said, I do think OP could manage a hard stop at 5 if wife was willing to let him sometimes go back to work for 30 minutes or so at some point before 8pm. There have to be tradeoffs here.

As for that big meeting day, and the unexpected snow day, I think it is ridiculous to say OP could not assume that his wife, on maternity leave, would watch both kids, while he prepared for and presented these important meetings. Yes, it sucks to take care of an infant and a 4 year old but with one parent on leave that should be the default. Of course if it were a regular work day, I am sure he would have takens some time off to help out. But this was just bad timing. [/quote]

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