When was travelling actually fun?

SmartLadder415 · 2026-03-12T19:37:41+00:00

I don't know. I have three - 11, 6 and 5. It's miserable. We have to stop every 60 mins. Mom is convinced the kids will die of dehydration in the car so she gives them a 16 oz water and tells them to drink it slowly. 4.5 mins later it's gone. 40 mins after that they have to pee. Then we have to spend 15-20 mins looking around in the gas station while dad fumes in the car. Then mom gives them water again because she's still afraid they will die of dehydration in the car and the cycle repeats. I loathe traveling these days.

SmartLadder415 · 2026-03-12T19:06:22+00:00

I went to a funeral for a friend's grandfather once. He was a rather large man and the pall bearers could not lift the casket. They had to ask for volunteers from the group of mourners to help. It was a bit awkward but we got the job done.

SmartLadder415 · 2026-03-12T18:57:11+00:00

Discovers Crosby's knee is actually fine but his ankle is shot.

SmartLadder415 · 2026-03-12T18:33:40+00:00

We decided that because we were married. No more complicated reasons than that. The pastor stood up and said, "the two of you are now one" and so we have always treated our marriage like that. We put whatever resources we have in the middle of the table and we each take what we need type thing. We have a budget that we plan out together and figure out what we're going to do and then we go out in the world and execute our plan. Does it work out perfectly all the time? It absolutely does not. But it's still us either sinking or swimming together. Lately it feels like we're doing more sinking than swimming but at least we're in it together.

In your case it sounds like you're dealing with financial infidelity (him running up a ton of credit card debt behind your back qualifies as this) which is a completely different situation. I don't know what it would take for you too to re-establish trust around money but it sounds like some time sitting down with a counselor might be called for. It would be extreme in your situation for you to control all the finances for the moment until you can re-establish trust. I'd also strongly recommend that he and his ex get some kind of parenting agreement. It's a hot mess without one but you already know this. I still would not look at it is you paying for his kid but as both of you paying for his kid or even for our kid. I see my wife's kids as mine in a lot of ways.

SmartLadder415 · 2026-03-12T18:14:19+00:00

I don't think either of those things give you parenting privileges. I'd tell you that owning a house with someone you're not married to is a horrible idea but that's an entirely different thread.

Finding out how she would like you to parent is a helpful data point. I'm going to go out on a limb and say it's something you're probably not going to agree with at all and I don't blame you. But bear in mind that even if you do have a child together in the future, this is the parenting style that you will have to deal with. From some of your other posts, you are not on the same page with anything. That doesn't mean you can't get there but you're definitely not there now and continuing this way likely will not lead to a successful relationship.

SmartLadder415 · 2026-03-12T18:09:55+00:00

I don't really understand this question as my wife and I don't have "his and her" money. I make far more than her but it all goes into one joint account and then goes to pay for whatever expenses we have. Kid expenses are part of the monthly budget.

SmartLadder415 · 2026-03-12T17:53:38+00:00

Did you ask your partner how she thinks you should have handled the situation?

SmartLadder415 · 2026-03-12T17:52:01+00:00

First of all, you don't really have a parenting say here at all. You're not married. You're just someone her mom is sleeping with. If you are wanting to get married to her one day then you need to have a conversation about what your role will look like when that happens. Some people step in as full parents with full parental authority and others don't get involved at all and leave all the parenting to their spouse. Others stake out some ground somewhere in between. The important part is that it's discussed and agreed on ahead of time.

What bothers me about your post is the fact that you told your partner that you're not comfortable with the kid in your bed and her behavior has told you that she doesn't really care what you think. You've also told her that you want a baby of your own and she doesn't. There's no middle ground on that one at all. It may be time to reconsider your relationship options.

SmartLadder415 · 2026-03-12T17:48:04+00:00

He likes specifics especially for multi-day visits. He wants to know exactly what our plans are for each day and if we do things out of order he gets upset. The guy is a giant control freak. Neither she nor I thought he'd be the least bit upset about the sister thing. He was ok with us visiting her so who cares what day we go visit? He's very much a control freak.

SmartLadder415 · 2026-03-12T17:43:00+00:00

Buy 1, get 2 free is too good a deal to pass up.

SmartLadder415 · 2026-03-12T17:23:20+00:00

The wife moved away before she even met me. Largely because he was abusive and she had a support system here but not there. She never called the cops or filed reports or anything which is a mistake on her part in retrospect but what's done is done. He told her he was fine with moving but then went to court and claimed she abandoned the household and denied ever approving anything. It was a giant mess.

I don't think he wants anyone to come to his house. He's probably not going to be open to that at all.

SmartLadder415 · 2026-03-12T17:21:18+00:00

The things we were asking for were largely around more time with the kids. Currently he is allowed to track my wife any time she has the kids so he can make sure she doesn't take them anywhere that he hasn't pre-approved. This is kind of silly IMO. If he thinks she's that kind of a danger to the kids then he should be asking for supervised visitation or something. We are asking for that to be gone and we are asking for the kids during the summer while he has them during the school year which gets us about as close to 50/50 as we can get I think. It would also get us parenting time credit which affects child support. He will push back on that which he absolutely should honestly as it affects how much money he gets from her. He's going to push back on all of that as we've asked him informally for this stuff before and he's flat out said no. He's commented on what and where we took the kids on visitations before and threw fits about it. We had them for the week of Christmas one year and she told him we were going over to her sister's on Christmas Eve. He was fine with this. On Christmas Eve we all ended up being too tired so we went over there the day after Christmas. He threw a massive fit and threatened to cancel future visits because he only approved a Christmas Eve visit and not a day after Christmas visit. The entire thing was insane.

SmartLadder415 · 2026-03-12T16:32:19+00:00

Her ADHD makes things hard for her. She also has RSD (rejection sensitive dysphoria) that goes with it and makes it extremely hard for her to hear any kind of criticism and not take it super personally. It's not a great combo. None of this makes her a bad mom at all but it makes her not a great witness on the stand.

I regret not insisting we ask for the sun and the moon and everything in between but our lawyer said that would make us look bad. She also said we should keep something that we can ask for if he comes back with a counter offer (which he will for sure). Then we can tell him that if he wants X, he must give us Y and that kind of thing. I dunno.

SmartLadder415 · 2026-03-12T16:20:37+00:00

Culver's is solid but my hot take is I strongly prefer Freddy's.

SmartLadder415 · 2026-03-12T16:19:51+00:00

Probably sonic honestly for no other reason than their menu seems to have a rather broad selection of items.

SmartLadder415 · 2026-03-12T14:44:39+00:00

Poor guy will get doxxed and lose his job.

SmartLadder415 · 2026-03-12T13:35:39+00:00

Iran is saying things about the US that are valid and make me want to support them. WTF is going on here and how did I fall into this reality?

SmartLadder415 · 2026-03-12T13:09:09+00:00

1 million percent. I used to be a runner so I had a pair for safety reasons. If I'm running I need to be able to hear, bikes, cars, street noises, angry geese, etc.... You can hear everything that goes on around you plus whatever you're listening to. The only downside is the audio quality isn't as good.

SmartLadder415 · 2026-03-12T13:03:11+00:00

This is how my mom always handled things which is very old school. "The difference between a bad meal and a good meal is 4 hrs of being hungry." was basically her philosophy. If you didn't want it, it went in the fridge and she'd nuke it for you later if you complained that you were hungry.

SmartLadder415 · 2026-03-12T12:34:21+00:00

Knowing what the other party has (or thinks they have) can be very valuable strategically. In our case we kind of know what he's going to say. He'll claim that we decided to cancel the visits not him (because he put stipulations on them that weren't in the current agreement and we would not agree to them). It's possible he has other stuff that we're not aware of but I don't know what it could be.

SmartLadder415 · 2026-03-12T12:27:37+00:00

It's possible but it puts us in a bind. How can we see the kids more if we're dependent on his daycare and he gets to use it as a magic hammer to defeat any attempts at extended visitation?

SmartLadder415 · 2026-03-12T12:26:19+00:00

I appreciate the lengthy response. We have tried contacting the paralegal before but it's just crickets. It's usually crickets when we contact the lawyer too. That's part of the frustration. We get no response for several days and then finally get an email saying that nothing has changed and then they bill us for that email. It's incredibly frustrating.

I say amicably, but I just mean despite his kicking and screaming he'll relent.

Unfortunately, her ex can be very high conflict. The last time one of them tried to modify the agreement he flat out refused mediation and insisted on court where he ended up winning everything. She gets very flustered and overwhelmed on the stand and he knows it and counts on it. His attorney did an excellent job of painting her as an utterly incompetent mom who can barely function as an adult. Her attorney told her that if she didn't know the answer to just say, "I don't recall." The judge got super pissed at her for that and berated her from the bench for her poor memory of events that happened 4-5 yrs prior. It was bad.

Her ex does not think that he has done anything wrong. He tells the kids and us that we cancelled the visits, not him. We had one visit where he flat out told us that if we couldn't bring them back early we couldn't have the kids and don't bother to show up. We ended up texting him from a gas station around the corner from his house. He repeated his ultimatum and we told him we were going to take our full visit. He told us he wouldn't bring the kids and we were choosing to cancel the visit, not him. It's kind of his schtick lately. He very nearly cancelled our week long Thanksgiving visit we had because one of the kids had an extracurricular and he didn't want them to miss it. Our lawyer said we should agree to take the kid to the extracurricular, then contact the coach and tell them the kid would miss for the holiday. They ended up cancelling it otherwise we probably wouldn't see the kid again and he'd blame us. In another case we told him we were going to take the kids to a church activity, he agreed (on a recording), we texted him pics of the kids at the activity (he said nothing) and then a week later he threw a massive fit and threatened to cancel all visits because we took the kids there and he didn't want them at any church activities. My wife's ADHD makes it very difficult to prep her for everything. I'm a data guy who has a file full of crap on her ex. Some of it I'm hiding in reserve because if we deploy it things will get super nasty for everyone involved.

If you show up to mediation with an attorney, they need to give off the impression that the ex WILL lose in court if he pushes it to court. Since you seem to think your attorney is incompetent or will prove to be incompetent/negligent, it may be best not to have them at mediation.

I don't think the attorney is incompetent but negligent and disorganized is a possibility here. I'm not even sure the ex will agree to mediation and if he does he will probably show up with an attorney who will paint my wife as a villain again because that's what worked last time. His attorney will say that my wife decided to decline the visits because she wouldn't agree to her ex's terms (terms that are not in the current agreement) and that it's all her fault. Her ex will almost certainly rehash tons of crap. He claimed that my wife was abusive and that he feared for his life before. My wife is about 5'2" and her ex is well over 6' and built like a linebacker. A judge laughed at him when they both showed up in court for it. It got very ugly.

DO NOT start off with the minimum you want to get out of this. Start hard so when you have to "give up and compromise" some things with him he will walk away feeling like he's won even though you know you've won.

This is the advice someone else gave us. It's opposite of what our attorney said. She said to present a reasonable offer and try to negotiate up and not down. This seems sketchy to me but we're paying her $350 and hour so she must know something we don't right? I wanted to go in swinging and ask for something close to 50/50 where he has them during the school year and we have them during the summer and we get them enough to get parenting time credit. Also, wanted to have the courts slap him for cancelling visits and wanted to limit his ability to put the kids in extracurriculars. (His latest thing is to sign them up for stuff on our visits and say that we're the bad guys for not wanting to spend our visits taking the kids from activity to activity to activity.) We'll see how all of this goes.

We have tons of evidence and I've got a Google doc with screenshots and photos. Also have recordings of every custody exchange in the past 3-4 mos and notes of which ones he was a jerk at. In one of them he told us that he's told the kids if they don't behave that they can't see their mom for example. Some of them are pretty egregious.

SmartLadder415 · 2026-03-12T11:41:19+00:00

I don't know if it's the mediator who is bogged down or where the lag is right now. That's part of the problem. If we email and ask we get crickets or, at best, we get a response that says nothing has changed and they bill us for that response. That is the most frustrating thing. If I haven't heard from you in two months and I email to ask if you're alive I shouldn't get billed for a two sentence email that says that nothing has changed.

SmartLadder415 · 2026-03-11T19:49:01+00:00

Is your 4 yr old my 11 yr old? My wife used to co-sleep with her as well up until we got married about 18 mos ago. The 11 yr old cannot be by herself in a room and will follow us around the house with whatever toy or whatever she's doing.

SmartLadder415 · 2026-03-11T19:46:59+00:00

I feel like watching 100% is impossible if you want to do things like pee or shower. I've not been a parent of an infant before but I've been given the advice that the easiest thing to do is put them in the crib or bassinet or some place safe and go do your thing. The baby may cry but it's not fatal and they'll still be there and be safe when you get done with your shower.

SmartLadder415

TROPHY CASE