Ok, so the situation with my in laws is long, complex and awful and not something that I'm going to bore you all with. There's one bit of it though, that I'm not sure what to do about....
We (thankfully) don't see them often, maybe every 4-6 weeks for an hour or so. We vary venues for meeting up, sometimes soft play or for lunch somewhere. We don't really like them coming to ours (many, many problems in the past with them visiting) but don't like to always suggest a neutral venue so they come to ours every now & again.
In December we went to theirs (they wanted us to). Our Little girl ( now 15 months, 10 months then) is really frightened of cats and dogs. They have a big golden retriever so in December when we visited my husband gently suggested to them that as LO wasn't familiar with their house, maybe having the dog in the room initially would be abit overwhelming on top of visiting a new place and would it be ok if they put the dog in the kitchen. We didn't think this was unfair, the dogs food, water & bed are all in the kitchen anyway, and we were only there an hour so it's not like she was put out for the full day. They agreed but when we got there FIL went on & on & on about how sorry he felt for the dog 'his poor baby' shut out of the room and kept going out to see her, coming back in and telling us how sad she was all alone. I felt terrible & caved in so the dog would come in, the baby screamed and we ended up leaving early.
The next few visits took place at ours or a neutral venue, but MIL insisted we go there last weekend as we hadn't been for so long. We felt we should but after last time didn't like to ask them to put the dog out (stupidly I think I hoped that after last time they'd do it unprompted) we got there, the dog was in the room, our LO was totally petrified, shaking, crying, clinging on to me so tight she marked my skin! They never offered to put the dog out, FIL wouldn't even leave the subject, instead he wrestled with the dog, making her growl. Then tried to get me to give him LO so he could wrestle with the dog?! He kept dragging the poor dog over to LO ( who never got off my knee) and trying to get LO to stroke the dog, going on & on about how the dog is his baby and LO was being silly.
It was awful. Again, we left abit early. We didn't say too much while we were there as things are already terrible between us and them. We were briefly estranged last year things have never recovered and were trying to keep the peace at the moment but thinking really it's pointless.
So, my dilemma is this. I think it's their dog, their house. If they don't feel comfortable putting the dog out that's totally fine, but I don't feel comfortable putting LO into that situation so as far as I can see the easiest solution is that we don't go there. Simple as that. That being said, I know they'll retaliate with the argument that LO has got to get used to the dog and only being around the dog will do this. I can see their point but I don't want to put her through it, who's being unreasonable?
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The in laws dog......
25 replies
BetterNotBitter · 22/04/2013 12:17
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