u/Kooky-Doughnut-8421

For some details. I put my toddler in an early preschool prep class. It's one or two times a week and kids get left with teachers for about an hour. Classes are small 5-7 kids with two teachers.

This small classroom setting makes it so that parents typically get rather close as they tend to hang out while waiting for their children. I do not do this. I take that hour and do my weekly grocery shopping. My wife sometimes does stay but she only occasionally does.

Now he's been in this for about a year now. And the class occasionally sets up holiday get-togethers. With other classes bigger groups and parents bring food kinda like a big potluck.

For safety reasons everyone has to disclose what is in the food. You never know what someone might be allergic to. And about a year ago in the fort gathering my wife said I made amazing cookies and offered for me to bake for the event. That was fine with me I made the cookies and everyone loved them. Especially a certain group of moms and kids. The ingredients were disclosed. Simple recipe sugar, butter, all purpose flour, vanilla extract, chocolate chips. That's all.

Now this went on for a year in different events. That same group loved my cookies even at times asking if they could take some home. I would always say yes if there were still some at the end. Not like I expected to have any to take home.

Now this is where the problems came in. One day one of the husbands of that mom group asked me for the secret ingredient. I didn't have one. But I did have a set of instructions on how to keep them soft. Timing and all that. He followed that and got a close softness. But not the taste.

This apparently had been a bit of a point of contention in that group because of one reason or another. Finally the group came and asked me about it. I told them the process and ingredients I used as well as amounts. They blew up. They were apparently a well known crunchy mom group in the school. I use store bought everything and was accused of trying to poison them and their kids by not disclosing all the chemicals inside the ingredients. When they read a simple ingredient they assumed it was some home grown naturally processed sugar I somehow made? God's no I was not going through all that trouble.

I thought it was really funny and burst out into laughter, which I acknowledge was not appropriate. But it seemed really funny to me because they absolutely loved these cookies. And it was because they hadn't had anything with sugar in so long that their bodies were craving it.

TLDR I've been feeding a crunchy mom group regular cookies for a year now and they just found out that they were not in fact some all natural home grown ingredient cookies. And are absolutely livid.

So my toddler, like many others I'm assuming, is a jerk. One very specific instance that makes me laugh is what he refers to as pizza. Now he knows what pizza is and loves it. But he also refers to quesadillas as pizza and knows it drives my wife mad because she likes things being called the right things. And I watch him laughing and holding up his slice of quesadilla calling it pizza while my wife tells him its proper name. Now this genuinely kinda irritates her but she also plays it up because his laugh is just so adorable

I have what should be a fairly good job I am a project manager / software engineer at a medium sized IT company making about 60k a year. The starting salary for anyone else in my position is about 80k. I've worked at this job for about 3 years. It was a very quick climb as within a year I moved up to my current position.

I think my wage is due to the way I got to my position. I was a warehouse worker and made my way up to warehouse tech when I showed an attitude and willingness to work on and fix the computers. From there I worked hard and pretty quickly I was prompted to project manager with some software engineer duties.

I don't have a BA but was working to make some money and pay for collage. but it became to expensive really quickly and I was unable to get get student loans. So I got a cert in web dev which was marketed as a programming/ software engineering trade course. That was a few years ago I've had various jobs in and around tech but my most recent one was a step up and I might be being greedy or not appreciating the opportunity I was given but the pay is hurting me when I know my coworkers make significantly more for the same work.

Now because everyone requires a BA for any position in either project management or software engineering I feel stuck. I have the knowledge and experience from working in tech for years and a decent position but I make less than my peers and when I look to other companies I get passed over because of my lack of formal education. I have only ever worked in tech and changing careers makes little sense considering I would still not be paid as much. so i I feel trapped and unable to progress. It sucks and I hate it

So I, 31m am happily married to my wife, 35f, her younger brother, 34m, lives in a different country where the dollar goes further than here and semi regularly calls her for money. It's always some new business opportunities or some reason he needs money. I have never cared too much it's usually $200ish not an amount I would really complain about and while I'm not rich my wife and I both have stable jobs and don't live paycheck. We do however have bills and recently had a kid and bought a house.

So bills are piling up. Still though the 200ish amount is okay it's 2-3 times a year and not gonna make or break my life if he calls her. Recently though it has been a lot more. He bought a new flagship iPhone and sent her the bill, then wanted to go work overseas and borrowed money and sent her the bill. That was around $4000. I felt it hit me in the wallet but grit my teeth after all he did get a better job in a more developed country and I can see why she sent him the money, his life would theoretically get better.

Then it turned out his job was being a sugar baby for some decently well off guy who he then left when he found a regular job. And idk how the law works there but he calls us saying that he needs to pay back his sugar daddy cause some loan laws or whatever and he needs another 2000 or he goes to jail. I said f*** it cause we don't want him in jail.

but send him to a family member that was in the area and have them make sure he's actually getting a job l, that family member agreed to let him live rent free for a while to save some money and pay us back a portion. After all I've now dropped $6000 on this guy for no reason.

His cousin told us she was going to get him the job he now has from the start and the transport for roughly 500 but he was just not willing to wait and got himself into debt or whatever weird situation for no reason. So I demanded he at least get his shit together.

He thought that was unreasonable and now my wife's extended family is trash talking me, my wife is on my side and I really don't care about their opinions of me but my wife is stressing because she can't just ignore it all and is fighting for my name. I just wanna ignore it all and go about my life, but I know that's realistically impossible because it's important to my wife so I want to either cut him off until I can get some assurance that a similar situation will not happen or just cut him out.