Am I being ungrateful?
:::Edit. I'm not gonna bring it up with them. There are other issues with our relationship with them that y'all have helped me realize are spilling over into this. For everyone whose advice was parents should just keep their house so tidy there is nothing to clean, we are just built different I guess 🤷:::
My FIL and his longtime girlfriend babysat at our house earlier this week. They stayed for a few hours in the evening while my husband and I went to a movie. The kids already had dinner.
My husband has asked his Dad in the past not to clean our house while they babysit. When we got home his girlfriend had "cleaned" our kitchen. She unloaded, reloaded (in the most jumbled random fashion), and ran the dishwasher. What she couldn't fit in the dishwasher she piled up in our sink so the sink was filled to the brim with dishes. She put our very sharp expensive knives at the bottom not the sink and stacked everything else on top. She sort of washed the counters but there were still crumbs on them and dirty water streaks. She also just put the dishes away wherever she wanted. A wine glass with our water glasses, cereal spoons with the spatulas, two separate stacks of salad plates in different parts of the dish cabinet. Virtually every drawer or cabinet had something in it that clearly did not match everything else that was in there.
My older kid apparently asked for scrambled eggs and instead of using a dishwasher safe pan, they used a cast iron skillet, but did not clean that out. They also did not clean the baby bottles I had in the wash basin next to the sink.
In fairness, our kitchen was dirty. But she cleaned it in such a chaotic way that she really did not save us any time, made an extra dirty dish that needs hand washing, and didn't actually get the counters clean. Also leaving sharp knives out of sight under a stack of other dishes is dangerous.
When we got home she saw me looking around and said she cleans her own kids' houses too.
I want to tell them again not to clean, but should I just accept the free babysitting and good intentions and leave it be?