Saturday, July 19, 2008

Vacations

What do holidays and vacations look like? Do you have set places that the family is excited to go to and visit regularly? Or do you go to a new place every time? Do you do vacations that aren’t tied to visiting family? For holidays, do you alternate with his family and yours? Or do you keep your holidays for your own family unit?

**I didn't try to load up this question. I was just looking for questions that might help guide your answer. Let me know if you think I need to only have one question mark per post. :)


It seems that any vacation time we have we use to go to visit with family. For the past 2 years, though, we’ve taken a family weekend getaway in the fall. Those have been fun times for us to stay in a hotel for a night or two and explore a different town within our state. We really look forward to those times!

We’d like to use vacation to travel and see some National Parks, San Diego Zoo, Disneyland, etc. But we’ll have to wait and see if/when that can happen with my husband’s work schedule and the kids ages. (Speaking of...do you do major road trips with your kids? What are good ages, do you think, to go see some of these big vacation destinations??)

Every five years, my mom’s cousins get together for an Olson Family Reunion. One of four family groupings (descended from my grandfather and his 3 siblings) takes turns to plan the locations, place, events, etc for that vacation. Since we’ve been married, my husband has been able to participate in 2 reunions. It’s an absolute blast seeing distant cousins (not sure if they’re called 2nd and 3rd cousins, or twice- and three-times removed), and watching the families grow. So, every five years, we have our vacation planned for us! We just need to save the $ to get there.

With my family living so close, we celebrate quite a few holidays together – Easter, Thanksgiving, Christmas. Though, I wonder if those holiday get-togethers may change since both of my brothers are now married and their in-laws live close by. We are very protective of our Christmas Day. We like to have that time just for us. Because of the physical distance between the members of my husband’s family, they only seem to get everyone together once a year. For the past 2 years, we’ve celebrated Christmas with them over the New Year weekend because that’s the best for everyone’s schedules.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Since our kids are 2, 1, and newborn, we have always gone to see family. It's the cheapest for now, and our kids are so young that their attention span is too short to spend the big money on Disney or even a National Park vacation. We have gone camping before and called that a "vacation" but it was really just a long weekend at the KOA. :) Even so, the kids had a blast and we got to spend time together as a family. We do take an annual trip to my hometown each January to see "the grandmas" (The kids have 2 great grandmas and 1 great-great grandma there), and the kid's like to do that. It's a long drive though, 10 hrs in the van, which they do well with. Hopefully someday we'll be at the point where going someplace not family related will be in order, and we can have a true blue family vacation.

Anonymous said...

Our only "vacations" are to visit family. But on the other hand I have been regarding all of our little weekend day trips as "vacations" lately. With kids 4,3,1 we plan a day at the state park nearby or the zoo or a picnic and that is a fun "vacation" for us.

Also this summer we are going to put up the tent in our backyard and sleep (if it warms up enough!) with a campfire and whatnot. We're looking forward to this!

Anonymous said...

Vacations usually revolve around family. It is not the way we want it to be but we can only travel so much and it is important to see our families. We always enjoy our trips when we go, once a year to each place, but it makes us sad that we don’t get our own family vacation. We have done overnight trips but it’s just not quite the same. I think we have only been on one vacation since we’ve been married that did not involve family. Hopefully that will change this fall. We visited our families in the spring so we are hoping for a “real” family vacation this fall. No plans yet but it will probably be somewhere we can drive to~Yellowstone, Grand Canyon, something like that. We do like to be home for Christmas, especially now that we have Mac. We want to make our own traditions and I love waking up in my own house on Christmas morning! As far other holidays, if people want to come see us, they can but we’re probably not going anywhere.