So after Saturday's small breakthrough (http://www.steptalk.org/node/214789), it appears that DH ran out of parenting.

One of the skids did nothing Friday night and nothing all day Saturday. Hung out in his room the entire time except for meals. Sunday morning he tells DH he has lots of homework. (My personal opinion is that he tried to game the system knowing that DH wouldn't enforce homework on Friday, and when it was clear DH was going to do a long thing with the other skid Saturday, he was home-free and could do nothing.)

Six hours later skid is apparently still not done with his homework and DH tells me that "he's almost done." I replied that DH also told me a few hours ago that other skid saw this skid playing games on his phone. I asked DH why he wasn't going to take away the phone as it was obviously a distraction and it was now close to dinner time, how long did he expect this to go on? (The amount of homework should have been under 2 hours, maybe even just an hour.) There was something going on that DH wanted to do and that's what he told me, that he didn't want to "deal" with it as he would rather do this other thing. So, he'd rather play than parent. (Note that he did take care of the phone and he didn't miss his fun. Sometimes parenting doesn't take that much time.)

[vent on]
Remember, I'm just supposed to "whisper" in the background and not parent directly. Later that night I happened to see that younger skid left the bathroom a mess after showering. DH asked me what I wanted him to do, wake up skid? No, but this is a frequent occurrence. THEN DH had the audacity to say that *I* should have said something to skid. It would have then been taken care of right away instead of later, as he likes to take care of things right away. (I just about lost it at this point since he's notorious for putting off parenting...see the incident above.)

I reminded him that I'm not supposed to parent because 1. BM quizzes the kids and if they complain then she complains to DH so it's less conflict if he parents, 2. they are his kids, 3. he ends up not liking me doing it because he doesn't like the way I do it.

But...we shouldn't worry about what BM thinks, this is his house. (See points 2 and 3 then, DH.) And, I told him that it's not okay for him to change the rules without letting me know and then ream me out for not following a new paradigm I knew nothing about. (It's at this point I lost it.)

Oh, but then he said he parented ALL of them yesterday. Yes, he did. And, I pointed out that he's always been welcome and encouraged to parent my kid. He doesn't have to do it much as I'm pretty much on top of things. (And he did that parenting while I wasn't home, so of course he's the adult in charge at that point.) Then he said I could have stepped in today to help him since he did all that parenting yesterday.

Really? Since when is there a parenting quota?

[vent off]