Halloween has come and gone. Thanksgiving and Christmas are just around the corner. The holidays are often are a time to make memories and celebrate with family. It can also be a really busy time of year. Then try throwing in 2 open adoptions and you can add a whole other layer to the mix.
Before kids, the holidays weren’t too complicated or stressful. In fact, we could sometimes even manage to squeeze in time with my family and with my husband’s family. We’re lucky that while both our families are in different states, they’re actually less than 90 minutes away from each other. Phew!
Now as a family of 4 with 2 young kids, we don’t want to do the whole traveling back and forth thing. Oh, and to make things just a little harder we don’t live near family! We’re about 6 hours away but we obviously want to spend the holidays with family so we are already traveling just to get to where our family is. However, it’s not just our parents that want to see the kiddos; they have their birth families who want to see them around the holidays. We try to take things fairly easy on our kids and please everyone, but it doesn’t always work out that way.
For my side of the family and my hubby’s side of the family we rotate every other year with Thanksgiving and Easter. Even years with my family and odd years with his… We do every Christmas Eve & morning with my family and then we spend Christmas day with his family. It works out well. We try to get time with all the grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins and friends. It doesn’t always work out to see everybody, but we certainly try! However, our daughter’s birth family lives near our families. What we’ve been doing the last couple of years is going to visit them a couple days before Christmas and celebrate with them. It certainly is a busy few days for us, but I think it is well worth it. After all, the holidays should be about spending time with those we love.
Our son’s birth family is a little more local and we usually sneak in an extra visit either before or after we travel to see everyone else. It just makes the holiday season extra-long and there’s nothing wrong with that!