u/Free_butterfly_

Ugh. Looking for gentle advice here because I’m really not sure what the right thing to do is.

For context, my husband has multiple siblings who live near us, and one who lives on the other side of the country. She visits every couple of years. This will be relevant later: she is a public school teacher in an anti-vax state and there are no direct flights between her state and our state, so she has to change planes in another anti-vax state.

Back in the fall, we told my husband’s siblings that we were expecting our second baby in early May. They were all thrilled. Soon thereafter, SIL texted all of us saying that she had booked a flight out to visit us in late May so she could meet the baby. My husband’s and my initial reaction was ecstatic (we rarely get to see her, she’s really the sweetest, and money is tight for her), but we both quickly shifted into concern about the timing of her trip and frustration that she hadn’t thought to check the dates with us before booking. Luckily, she’s going to stay with another sibling, so we don’t feel any pressure to put her up. However, our baby is going to be 3.5 weeks old when she arrives.

My concern is that she’s going to be traveling through two anti-vax states, and our baby won’t have started his vaccinations until he’s 8 weeks old. He has all the immunity from the vaccines I got while pregnant, as well as whatever immunity is in my breast milk, but that’s it.

I might be paranoid here, but there are some nasty bugs floating around these days. We’re already doing everything we can to keep our toddler from spreading his daycare germs to the baby. But I’m worried about all the other bugs SIL can pick up from her students and the two airports she’ll be in.

When SIL visits, my instinct is to find a kind way of letting her know that she can’t hold the baby. (Or maybe she can hold the baby, but with a mask on? I’m really not sure what’s best here.) I’m struggling to trust my gut on this because I don’t want to seem like we’re being punitive or overly cautious, and she visits so rarely, and I want her to have a great time. But at the end of the day, she should have checked with us BEFORE booking the trip so we could pick a date together that was after Baby had had some vaccines.

What are your thoughts on this, Reddit? Should I:

a) let her hold the baby; she probably won’t have anything worse than what toddler is picking up from daycare anyway;

b) let her hold the baby with a mask on;

c) don’t let her hold the baby at all

Please be kind; my postpartum hormones are all over the place. Thank you in advance!

I might be able to squeeze in another workout this weekend but I suspect we’ll be doing toddler-centric activities all weekend for our 3yo, so I have accepted that this is my “farewell” workout for the next few weeks.

For anybody curious about what types of workout moves I’m doing: I gave up on lower body exercises about 3 weeks ago due to back pain (I was doing the sled, a modification of RDLs, abductors, adductors, and leg extensions), so I’ve just been doing only upper body free weight work this past month while sitting on the adjustable bench (biceps, triceps, chest press, overhead press, shoulders). I work out 1x/week with a trainer and 2x/week by myself. I have created my own little pregnancy-friendly modifications for everything to protect my lower back. I’m proud that I’ve continued to increase the weights up until the very end!

For anybody wanting to work out as long as possible, I highly recommend listening to your body, focusing more on good form than any specific numbers, implementing any modifications you need, allowing sufficient rest between workout days, and getting plenty of protein/electrolytes. It’s all about the long game. Pushing yourself too hard could mean having to end your journey early, so do everything you can to listen to yourself and set yourself up for success long term. It all helps.

You can do this!! 💪

My husband and I are both going through this and it’s the strangest thing.

It’s like, both of our moms infantilize our dads as part of their codependent dynamic. But as our dads age (terribly, I’ll add), our moms are getting frustrated that our dads are so incredibly helpless. So they start shaming our dads in front of us to get us to back them up in advocating to our dads to improve their lifestyle.

They’ll send us group texts about our dads’ latest health situations that feel pretty private. When my mom visits, she’ll help herself to some of my frozen homemade meals to take home to my dad because he “just can’t feed himself”. I saw my parents last weekend, and my mom (in front of my dad) started telling me how great it is that he has started going for walks. She clearly wanted me to affirm that to my dad, the grown-ass man sitting quietly next to her.

Or when they come visit our toddler on occasion, they’ll spend the entire time trying to get us to help them praise our dads, who for their part are doing the absolute bare minimum. “Isn’t your dad such an amazing grandpa? He just read his grandson a BOOK!”

Both of our moms have also tried to infantilize my husband - for his part, he shoots them down immediately.

It’s the strangest thing. I’m sorry, but it is not my responsibility to help you parent your husband, and I’m not going to triangulate your relationship. Either learn to communicate with each other or don’t; but leave me out of it.

ETA: to clarify, I absolutely place blame on the husbands in both marriages for being useless. I’m not just blaming the wives. However, in my and my husband’s particular family units, both of our dads are useless in a few ways, including communicating and coordinating with family. So our dads aren’t the ones telling us about their health woes or asking for validation. I think if they were left to their own devices, we’d never hear from them. Which, in our case since we have a toddler and Baby #2 due next week, I’d be fine with. But instead, we both have moms who are pushing upon us their own stress about their useless husbands, and who are trying to get us to play similarly enabling roles towards our dads. It’s our moms who are actively trying to put us in positions that we simply don’t want to be in. Yes our dads suck because they’ve weaponized incompetence; but we only know about it because of our moms’ determination to bring us down with them. I’m not sure if that all makes sense but just wanted to clarify.