I am a single mother of two grown children; 20 and 24. I have been dating the same man for almost 2 years and he has three children, ages 20, 15, and 11. He shares custody with their mother. I have become quite involved with the children. I work three 12 hour shifts per week on the night shift, and spend 2 to 3 nights per week at his home. We live 70 miles apart.
I try to include the children as much as possible. My weekends off correspond to the weekends that his children are at the house. We both work full time. On the weekends, he has household duties to tend to. He recently made over his backyard to be more family friendly, with a hot tub, deck and music etc. He lives in a "fixer upper" and so there is a lot to be done at the house and his weekends are spent tending to household responsibilities. I enjoy this, and so I help and try to get the kids involved. Unfortunately, the kids are not interested in helping around the house, but want to go to theme parks, the beach, etc. I often hear them saying "you never spend time with us", yet we are accessible to them, are willing to include them in most of the things that we are doing, but they are not interested. I think this is merely an attempt to manipulate their father into spending money on them and taking them to a resort.
While I feel that spending time with children is very important, I also feel that children need to have responsibilities at the home, and I feel that home improvement projects, sitting and relaxing together, are much more valuable than taking them to a fancy hotel and a theme park. I have asked the children to make a list of activities that they consider "spending time together" in an attempt to spend as much time together and also I guess to explain that spending money and spending time are not the same. None of the children have provided this list. I spend a good amount of time with his children when he is not there and have gone out of my way to entertain them, but they have no interest in reading, no interest in helping around the house, no interest in anything other than TV and the computer. This leaves them sitting at the table with us when we are relaxing in the evening, and whining that they are bored. They live on 2.5 acres, have every video game system available, are allowed to invite friends over, are encouraged to help with household responsibilities, but still they are bored. I feel that I have done everything possible (short of putting on a clown suit and performing for them) to encourage family time. Any ideas on what I can do to continue enjoying dating my man and becoming a part of this family without the clown suit?
