Sorry this is so long.

My husband (26) travels for weeks and months at a time for work, his schedule recently changed so he’s going to be home more often but entirely sporadic and unpredictable. We have 2 kiddos, the oldest is almost 4 and younger one just turned 1. I am a stay at home mom so taking care of them and our house and myself is a must for making it work. When he’s home, it’s like full on vacation and he likes to cook so he spends gobs of money on expensive ass ingredients to cook an entire huge meal for the 2 of us basically and he refuses to eat anything leftover. I can’t hardly keep up with it and I hate wasting food, which is wasting money.

He and I have drastically different preferences on nearly everything. House temp, bedding preference, furniture and decor preference, vehicle preference, budgeting and spending, parenting and level of involvement, food preferences, how to spend free time, when to go to bed, when to wake up, etc.

I want to get back to my routine as if he wasn’t home, which means routines for the kids too. As well as meals, as I eat very healthy and honestly pretty light, I have a lot of fitness goals, not to lose weight because I’m really skinny, but to build muscle. So if I make food, he usually goes out and grocery shops to make a whole meal himself instead of eating what I make, and he usually cooks something with steak or seafood and something cheesey or deep fried. Which I love, but not every single day. So I usually don’t even bother cooking for myself, because I can’t bear to be bleeding so much money on just food because I can’t stop him from making second meals to eat instead of what I cook. But my dilemma is, it just bothers me to have such separateness in our lives with his work and his level of involvement in that outside of the actual job (lots of phone calls and paperwork). Like getting up, working out, feeding the kids, going for an outing or cleaning the house, errands, various meals, then bedtimes and getting to bed at a reasonable time so I have the energy to work out in the mornings. I’m just struggling to keep up with everything with having so many things going on when he’s home but no real help to take care of the existing and essential chores and child tasks. 😩 I try to go on business as usual with some fun things and down time mixed in but I seriously suffer, I’m exhausted constantly because of staying up so late because he gets disappointed when I go to sleep early, but the baby keeps me awake constantly through the night, and I get up earlyish to have any time to myself with no opportunity to nap because of all the stuff we have going on.