Spouse/SO Frustration....

AJ_Dual

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Okay, I know I'm not the only one. The wife and I are pretty stressed right now, we've had back-to-back sets of twin girls in the past year, eleven months apart. (No, we didn't plan it that way... After seven years of trying, and finally getting the first set of twins, we didn't imagine we'd ever get more, the first set started sleeping through the night, and the rest is history... :D )

Anyway, we're getting through it okay, and our four precious little daughters make it all worthwhile. Our marriage is pretty good except for one thing.

On several of the hot 90+ degree days this summer, I've come home to find the thremostat set to 59. I ask my wife what's going on, and she says, "I set it to 50 so it would get down to 70 'faster'."

(sigh)

No amount of explanation that setting the thremostat to 70 would accomplish the exact same thing would convince her otherwise.

Anyone else care to share?
 

cslinger

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Dude if that is the worst of your problems then I raise a glass to you.

Don't sweat the small stuff. My wife is the same way only I like it cold and she likes it hot. Just live with it or make a habit of checking and adjusting the thermostat on your own.

Congrats on the...uhhh, well tribe. :D My wife and I are trying to have one as well.

Chris
 

Makarov

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Hmm, while I don't have a wife(or girlfriend...) my job is in a all women workplace (I'm working with handicapped children in a school)
After 6yrs of this I've found out that somethings just can't be changed.

Example; one of the lady's is moving towards 50, and is always complaining about it being to hot in the room. One of the other ladys is always freezing, so these two is constantly fiddling with the radiators.
I've tried to tell them that our workplace has a balanced heat/ventilation-system that works best if left alone, but NOOOO, one is freezing and turns some (note not all) of the radiator to MAX, while the other walks in half an hour later and turns all radiators she finds to MIN. This way the day pass until all leave for the night.
Come next day the temprature in the room is approx 55F and I find 2 ovens on max and 3 turned off. Everybody starts talking about how the heat-system isn't working right, and I have to start my "it's all balanced" rant again to no avail...

I cry when I think of winter :-(

On the other hand, as I work in a school, I daily meet people who wouldn't live long if they had to catch their own food.

One of our male teachers was helping some female teachers move a piano in the elevator, but couldn't make the elevator move. As I moonlight as the residental handyman in the school, I was asked to look at the elevator, as there was SURELY something wrong with it.
I took one look at the piano and pushed it in about an inch so that it did go clear of the photocell. They all just looked at me when the doors shut and the elevator started to move...

The upside of this is that I'll never be out of a job, as they don't dare downsize me.
 

lymph

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Just tell her that the AC is either on or off, and as long as the temperature is above the thermostat setting, it's on.
 

zespectre

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lymph said:
Just tell her that the AC is either on or off, and as long as the temperature is above the thermostat setting, it's on.

Won't work. Doesn't work with my wife either. I finally had to stick a thermometer in the output grille and show her that the air only comes out at 50 degrees regardless of her fiddling. NOW she gets it.

BUT

She still turns the electric stove up to 500 to try and make it "heat up faster". Actually I think it's kinda funny.
 

greenLED

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zespectre said:
She still turns the electric stove up to 500 to try and make it "heat up faster".

You mean your oven doesn't work that way? ;) :laughing:

Congrats on the babies!
 

glockboy

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It's a woman things that nobody understance.
learn to let it go, just be happy to come home to your wife and kids.
 

James S

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2 sets of twins!!! WHAT where you thinking??? :D

When my wife decided it was time to have children I told her that she could have a boy or a girl, whichever she wanted but one at a time please :) I thought I was being very understanding not to make demands...

quadruple congrats on your wonderful family :D If they are sleeping through the night then you're not as bad off as you think :) My Son is a year old and doesn't regularly sleep through the night, and my daughter has a nasty cold (since school just started of course) and so wakes up every 3.5 hours as her stuffy nose medicine wears off... So I'm a bit tired too, but I can only imagine twins :wow: :laughing:

My wife does exactly the same thing with the AC. My wife is ludicrously educated with 9 years of post graduate education. She can setup 500 different parameters to make a dialysis machine work, but cant understand how to set the AC. I think it just makes her feel better to do that.

But honestly, it doesn't matter as long as you catch it that evening. If it's 90+ out, and the inside temp is above the setpoint that you would recommend it will be running constantly anyway. When you notice you can turn it back to normal. Otherwise you'll wake up at 3am and it WILL be 50 in the house! But as long as you catch it before then it's not a big deal.
 

Pydpiper

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2 sets of twin girls and your worried about the thermostat? That is funny!
My only advice is to enjoy your family, that is just way too cool..
 

raggie33

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ekk 4 kids i have problems with my jalepono plants there already talking back to me .
 

whiskypapa3

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One solution that worked for me, bought a thermostat at a flea market, remooved old t'stat and rewired to a different location. Screwed flea market one where old one was. Momma's hormone warped brain was happy. Worked for a couple of years til I upgraded HVAC and put a locked box around t'stat.
 

Lurker

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AJ_Dual said:
I ask my wife what's going on, and she says, "I set it to 50 so it would get down to 70 'faster'."

All wives do that. Mine certainly does. Fortunately, she does not know how the digital programmable thermostat works and is always wondering why it gets set back to a reasonable temperature every few hours. "Honey, did you change the thermostat?" "No, Dear, that is how it works, remember?"

Of course, if she is ever a little chilly or a bit warm, the condition can't be resolved with a sweater or whatever. It requires heating or cooling the entire house and making everyone else uncomfortable.

My wife always cooks everything on "high" for the same reason. One day she boiled the pacifiers on "high" and forgot about them. When the water evaporated, the plastic and latex all melted into a blob and started burning. The smoke was thick, black and noxious. Definitely not recommended.
 

AJ_Dual

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Ha ha! I'm so glad I'm not alone in this. I now see all the ways my parents, or our married friends annoy one another. which is exactly the same as my wife and I. I always feel better whenever an annoying thing turns out to just be man/woman issues that probably play themselves out the world over.

I'd write up my "man foibles" but I'm largely blind to what they are. Forgive me if I don't invite my long-suffering overtime full-time mommy of a wife to join CPF and post them for you… ;)

I'd have to say, as a man, my biggest foible is probably "gear-itis", Guns, knives, PDA, GPS, watches, lighters, lasers, computer, camping, tools. But I don't have to tell anyone that, as "gear-itis" is why CPF exists. But now we have baby-itis, in spades.

Thanks to everyone for the congrats on our kiddos and ditto-kiddos! It's only been 13 months since we had no kids to going to FOUR. In some ways it's surreal, in others I can't imagine life before them. You're definitely all catching me at the "tender age" where suddenly EVERYTHING your parents ever SAID, DID, or FELT, makes sense. Although on the part of Mrs. AJ_Dual, 4 kids and only two pregnancies is pretty darn efficient. :)

After seven years and nothing, and after lots of wrangling and help, we finally got our first set of fraternal girl twins who are now just over one year old. I tell you, something about being pregnant "cleans out the pipes", because the second set was started when they miraculously slept through the night ONCE, and we got frisky… Neither of us really imagined we'd ever have more, and if we did we would gladly have another shot at more kids. We just didn't expect it to be so soon.

Before the second set was born, we watched lots of cable TV documentaries on families with quads(strike that, that basically describes us.), quints, sextuplets, or more to make us feel better. It usually works, until we say "wait a minute, they only have one-two more than us, and it's worthy of being put on TV?"

The blessing that allows us to maintain our sanity (barely) is that twins is all we know. The only practice for raising twins, is twins. In a way, our second set of two month old identical girls is "easier" in that we have all our hard-won experience from the first set, and it's still very fresh in our minds. OTOH, it's harder, because we now have to balance "toddler mode" against "infant mode", and you can't care for everyone all the time. Hopefully it will all lead to the benefits of "big family" type kids, but there will be no firstborn, only child, or lastborn "baby" syndrome.

We now laugh at our friends and acquaintances, all the "exhausted" parents with just one baby. You'd better have had triplets or quads before you'll get our sympathy! LOL
 

lahjik

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Dec 12, 2004
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Get a digital thermostat that you can program on a 7-day cycle. Then, if your wife has an at all predictable cycle, you can set your thermostat to cool the house to 70 degrees by the time she gets home.

I do that with our heat in western ny (cold enough, thank you). Thermostat tells the house to warm up so when we stumble out of bed at 5:30 we don't freeze too much, then it cools back down by the time we are out of the door at 8:00. Works in reverse for summer =)
 

zespectre

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bwaites said:
I thought they all worked like that!!!:thinking: :)


Bill

Actually we had this old gas monster from the late 50's that had a whole second set of jets in the broiler. If you turned the setting to a point just between the oven and broil settings all four sets internally would kick on. Believe me it heated the oven up faster!

It also turned dinner into charcoal faster than you can imagine!
 

picard

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How do you differentiate the kids apart ? Do you write down a number on their feet? :wow:
 
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