Biting my tongue
I respect my sister and brother-in-law as parents, but sometimes my brother-in-law does things that just flat out make me mad. For starters, my sister is a stay-at-home mom and my brother-in-law works 45 minutes away from where we live, so he leaves early in the morning (around 7) and doesn't get home until 6:00 at night. During that time my sister is the one responsible for my niece (she loves being a mom, it's not a burden to her or anything). The problem is--my brother-in-law gets home from work and wants to relax, play games, watch television and usually that means my sister is the one taking care of the baby even after he gets home. She's usually the one who has to wait to eat dinner (BooBoo KNOWS when we're eating and she wants to be fed the same time) so she can feed my niece while my brother-in-law eats and then goes back to do whatever he wants. She is also the one who mainly gets up with my niece at night since my brother-in-law drives all day long for his job and she doesn't want him to be tired while he's driving. Even when he's taking care of my niece he ends up getting distracted by something (he has A.D.D. and is not on medication right now) so he's only half paying attention to my niece. He's not a bad dad because when he focuses he is really great, but sometime I get so frustrated. Lately, I've been finding it difficult to bite my tongue like I've done before, but I don't want to call him out and make him feel like he's a crappy father and, in turn, make my sister mad.
My sister and I are very close and I hate to see her extremally stressed out when her husband could (and should) be helping her. I help out as much as I can, but as an auntie it's not really my responsibility to put her down for bed or feed her to take care of her when her dad is home. I don't mind doing it for my sister because she has her all day and all night and sometimes she just needs to take a break to catch a few hours of sleep (especially when my niece is up every hour) but if her dad is home HE should be the one doing all of this stuff not only to give my sister a break, but to spend some time with his daughter.
Like I said, I've been biting my tongue because THEY are her parents and not me and I know that they need to learn things on their own. I usually leave it up to my sister to say something since it's her husband and her daughter, but lately it's just gotten really difficult. I know he's capable of more than he's giving and it's frustrating to be the one who has to step in to help when he's there. Is there a way to tell him 'hey, this isn't my job.' without sounding rude? I've expressed this concern to my sister (nicely) but never to my brother-in-law.