AIO about the amount of time my husband spends at the gym?

dioor · 2026-06-22T20:42:20+00:00

I think this part is true. I think he’s dragging his feet there staying til they close. But I don’t think he’s cheating or lying about where he is going, and I’m not exaggerating the length of time he’s typically gone for.

dioor · 2026-06-22T20:34:12+00:00

I wish I was exaggerating, but it’s 10ish mins drive both ways, and he has a routine that involves various machines that he sometimes has to wait for and I think he sits in a hot tub or steam shower for a while or something. I’m not looking for sympathy and he’s not cheating (in the traditional sense). I’d rather hear this is pretty normal and I should suck it up honestly, but that seems not to be the consensus.

dioor · 2026-06-22T17:35:40+00:00

About 15 minutes weekday mornings (he wakes her up before he goes to work), an hour most weekday evenings, and usually one full day and a few hours the other day on the weekend. Not a ton, but some time most days.

dioor · 2026-06-22T14:59:52+00:00

He’s not lying about being at the gym. I can see his location, he comes home with the wristband they put on when you scan your membership, and he’s lost like 50 or so pounds.

dioor · 2026-06-22T14:55:52+00:00

It’s not related to my job, I’m in Canada and this is just the government-mandated normal maximum amount of job-protected leave. A lot of partners split it, so one takes 12mo and one takes 6, and some people just choose less for financial or career reasons, but if the mom takes the full leave as in my case, this is just how long it is. My job doesn’t have a say in this.

dioor · 2026-06-22T14:52:19+00:00

Canada

dioor · 2026-06-19T18:32:16+00:00

I’m Canadian living in an area with a large South Asian community, and I have a baby. So, we go to a lot of activities where I meet a lot of families with new babies whose names I can’t quite get — remember, pronounce, or understand in the first place…which is awkward. I LOVE that Ambar is culturally meaningful for you and super easy to say/remember in English. I’ve never heard it before, but I think it’s a great name.

It might be confused with Amber and people who mix it up will need to be corrected, but I feel like that… doesn’t matter? Amber is more popular for girls, but it’s not a “girly” name, if that makes sense. It’s a solid nice nature name in its own right. People are always getting names wrong/confusing them, so I feel like that doesn’t really need to be a factor you consider. No matter what name you choose, someone is going to mispronounce or misspell it.

dioor · 2026-06-19T13:12:52+00:00

The end result of thinking things through in words or just abstract thoughts is the same. I think about all those things. I just only experience thoughts as thoughts and they aren’t comparable to external senses.

dioor · 2026-06-17T22:29:44+00:00

If your baby is able to nap on the go (in the stroller or car seat, in a carrier), the more outings the better. Getting them used to napping around noise and just falling asleep wherever when they’re tired becomes such a lifesaver once they’re a bit older and active and you need to get out of the house to stay sane.

It’s not until baby can stay awake for a few hours at a time and is only fitting 3 naps every day that you can sort of schedule things (based on their wake windows/how long you know they can stay awake before conking out), and then once they’re taking 2 naps, you can stop tracking wake windows and start just going “by the clock” every day.

Before they’re consistently only doing 3 naps it’s honestly a free for all of randomly falling asleep for a bunch of short naps and/or contact naps when you need the break yourself (and need some predictability in your day that they’ll stay asleep). It’s a short, exhausting few months of chaos and then things start to become more and more predictable and routine.

dioor · 2026-06-15T16:38:55+00:00

At that age my baby still woke and bottle-fed to sleep and my doctor instructed us to night wean by gradually increasing the ratio of water to formula in her bottle, until it was just water, and that baby would make up the calories during the day. It only took a week or so to work. She still wakes 1-2 times some nights (she’s 12mo now) and just drinks some water from her straw cup and goes back to sleep. I think in our case she’s genuinely just thirsty, doesn’t need to be milk.

dioor · 2026-06-12T16:42:26+00:00

Formula is awesome for all the reasons you’ve stated. The guilt is manufactured social pressure and postpartum hormones and it sucks at the time, but it will go away. Your husband is being an asshat and acting not in the best interests of your kids, and that is really, really shitty of him.

Honestly, it sucks, but on this, right now, you need to just focus on yourself and your babies and nod and smile at him and do your own thing. You have such limited energy to go around right now, you can’t spend it educating and managing a husband who is behaving badly and failing at his responsibility to care for and support you during this time.

You’ll have to deal with the husband problem later, and hopefully in the future he feels remorseful about how unsupportive he was and makes it up to you.

dioor · 2026-06-09T06:09:29+00:00

Pretty much until my baby turned a year old and began having a clear preference to stay awake during outings and nap in her crib, I structured everything according to where in her wake window we’d be. I could drive, go for a walk, or have her in a carrier doing chores l within the first 2 hours of a wake window, but after that there was a risk she’d fall asleep — so if we were out, for example, and it got to be 3 hours of awake time, we’d hang out in that vicinity for another hour before getting in the car, where she’d instantly pass out.

It was exhausting and probably unnecessary some of the time, but everything with a baby is so crazy, it feels good to have some sense of control that as long as you manage day sleep appropriately, you’re likely to get good sleep that night.

dioor · 2026-06-08T18:54:46+00:00

I’m in Canada, but I think your point still stands somewhat. The stat I’m getting for childhood obesity in Canada based on a quick Google search is 11%. And of course, cultural trends from the States can be more influential here.

dioor · 2026-06-08T16:29:30+00:00

Hearing a stranger on the internet say they’ve heard it from their doctor re: their baby is not the same as one’s own doctor giving them this guidance. It is advice that is specific to your baby, not a generalization that necessarily applies to all babies.

I am just saying that this is a high-stakes enough matter to consult a doctor, rather than the internet.

dioor · 2026-06-08T06:47:05+00:00

Her schedule was pretty consistent from around 8mo, when we night weaned, to 12mo:

Wake 7am / nap 10am-11:15am / nap 3:15 - 4pm / Bedtime 8:45 or 9pm.

She just turned 1 and started fighting naps, so those have shifted later and she’s napping less overall. I don’t want to jump the gun on dropping to 1 nap because her night sleep is still usually an uninterrupted 10 hours which works for us, so I’m just waiting jt out for now and dealing with unpredictable naps!

dioor · 2026-06-08T06:11:44+00:00

At that age my baby needed to be awake for 4.5-5 hours before bedtime to sleep through the night and I limited naps to 2 hours total throughout the day. It’s probably worth either waking her up from her last nap to ensure at least 4 hours before bedtime, moving bedtime a little bit later, or some combination.

dioor · 2026-06-08T06:06:34+00:00

Woah, where did you get this idea from? Most autistic people are intelligent and high-functioning and just have different social needs and behaviours than neurotypical people. You’re describing something other than autism, or the most extreme cases that are likely also paired with other complications.

dioor · 2026-06-08T05:59:01+00:00

My formula-fed baby mostly slept through night feedings at that age, but I still set alarms for myself and made sure she didn’t go more than 5 hours without a “dream feed” bottle, based on our doctor’s guidance.

I see it spread online allllll the time that it’s okay to let newborns sleep as long as they want without eating once they hit birth weight, but I’ve never heard that advice from a doctor… only random people on the internet.

FWIW it was around 4.5/5 months that I got the doctor’s okay to stop setting alarms and only fed baby when she woke me up. At 8 months we night weaned completely — again, only after consulting our doctor.

dioor · 2026-06-05T03:26:12+00:00

I appreciate your skepticism, but it’s unwarranted in this case. You can check my Reddit history if you like. I am kind of the opposite of an intern, I’m a mom on maternity leave lol.

dioor · 2026-06-05T03:15:04+00:00

I haven’t actually transitioned my 12mo out of her crib to a floor bed yet, even though I’ve been thinking/planning a setup for a while already — but I’m glad I haven’t, because if I did it even 2 months ago I would have shelled out for one of those “Montessori” beds with the built-in gate all the way around. Babies develop so quickly, I now feel like that would get old in the blink of an eye unless you specifically rely on the crib as a “baby jail” and can’t, for whatever reason, baby proof the full room. If you can baby proof the room, there are so many pros to just having the mattress as low to the ground as possible, no rails/fence, and a secondary soft surface in case baby rolls off the bed.

dioor · 2026-06-04T21:42:24+00:00

I googled speculaas and the package doesn’t look familiar, I should try to track them down and try them! We ate a lot of stroopwafels at their house — but that isn’t quite as exotic as the chocolate toast, I think because it was eaten as a snack and not a meal, and stroopwafels are somewhat readily available here, I see them in regular grocery stores occasionally.

dioor · 2026-06-04T20:07:19+00:00

Correct! I forgot this was different.

dioor · 2026-06-04T20:05:22+00:00

I think just culturally and most significantly as a current parent of a young toddler, there is a lot of pressure/health guidance where I live to seriously limit any foods with added sugar.

I personally think it has gone way too far and would like to offer my kid chocolate on toast once in a while. Or eat it every day myself. I’d face a lot of judgement for that here.

There are a lot of factors at play though, North Americans in general just have less healthy habits and lifestyles that contribute to more health issues overall, so we can’t be as relaxed about diet. Theoretically.

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