@jlkuhioe My family lives in another country and SO’s parents are getting on with age. My LO is nearly 3. When he was younger, they used to take him for a day each week, but in the last 6 months he has gotten too tall and heavy for them to pick up and his energy levels are even too much for SO and me sometimes.
Now we make sure to bring him to their place once every weekend for a few hours, but we dip out for 1-2 hrs max during that and usually SO helps them with something around the house.
LO started nursery full time this week. SO works from home, but lots of calls etc, so it’s definitely easier not to have LO and me wrestling downstairs. I work and study part-time… Not gonna lie, I was miserable when I was at home with him full-time; I felt so lonely and just… like I couldn’t do anything right. And then I felt horrible for not ‘enjoying him’ more. It got lots better once he started going to nursery 2-3 times a week. So maybe that made up for the lack of village.
More of a village might have helped from the get-go, I don’t know.
Edited to add: Just remembered how my family visited for a week (1 hr flight away) when LO was a few weeks old and I thought ‘Thank God, help, maybe SO and I will get some sleep’ and apart from asking me why I looked so tired every 2 hrs and taking LO for a 20 min walk, I had to constantly be there as nobody wanted to change a nappy so I could lie down. Never mind that they all talked about how much they’d help before they came. They didn’t even put their own dishes in the dishwasher. Jesus lol