When you are feeling like your husband's a deadbeat and thinking to yourself, "He doesn't spend enough quality time with the children," you should take an honest look at your family's schedule. Your husband may actually be a deadbeat, but you should make sure that's true before you just assume the lack of quality time he is spending with the kids is all his fault.

If you are like me and your husband and you have agreed that you have the responsibility of deciding the "when" and "where" on the family's schedule, then you should ask yourself a few questions.

Do I make dinner at home on week nights or do we eat "fast" food?

Do I pack the family into the car and then run errands all day on the weekends?

I ask this because I've noticed that my family has a lot more time together when we eat at home and when we stay at home.

Even though I hate taking the kids to the grocery store alone, I am growing to hate even more the fact that I am wasting my husband's day off with the kids by going from store to store on Saturdays.

And, even though I am exhausted from a day alone with the kids and I've cooked and cleaned up after breakfast and lunch already and I don't even want to think about chopping peppers and onions and I know I will have to spend at least thirty minutes in front of the stove and thirty more after dinner cleaning up, I've noticed that the nights I suck it up and cook something, anything, just as long as we eat at home, are the exact same nights Dwayne has ten minutes to sit and read to the baby and almost half an hour to play Rummy with Norah.

So, consider your family's schedule, too. Start paying attention to how much time things actually take and then see if eating out and running errands together is really saving you any time at all.