Besides vacations and holidays - how much actual time/quality time do you get to spend with your children?

Pretty often. I think. Depends what quality time is.

I have one son, daughter in law and grandchild who live about 20 miles away and they try to visit Grandma weekly. Love it! The rest of my family live a good distance. We see each other 2 to 3 times a year, sometimes more. But, we try to make it a good time for the grandkids, so they have pleasant memories to store in their memory banks.

I feel incredibly lucky in this area.
A little over a year ago my job changed so that I’m primarily work-from-home (when I’m not traveling). So, there are a LOT of days that I can have breakfast, lunch and dinner with my kids.
Whenever I’m in town and they have a school event I can usually carve out some of my day (my hours are flexible—just so long as the work gets done) to attend.

I always used to make effort to be there for kid events..but now I’m frequently the “room mother” who leads the party at school.

Even before that all changed I’ve always been my middle daughter’s Girl Scout troop leader, the assistant den leader for my son’s Cub Scout troop (my husband is their den leader) and we teach Sunday school for our middle daughter’s class. (She’s a painfully shy kid—so having us involved in her activities has made it possible for her to do a lot of stuff.)

So..we get a LOT of quality time with our kids. Makes me very happy…happy that they still want us around and happy that our house is often filled with their friends..

Each of my sons live about 3,000 miles from me in opposite directions now. I hope to see them around 3–4 times a year; it’s not as much as I would like.

And how is the sexy Bubby these days?

@janbb Does one of your sons live on the US west coast and the other in Europe?

We get his kids at house about once a month for an overnight or two. Usually they all (I’m 99 % at work) will make breakfast, play videos, go paintballing, go target shooting, go indoor speedway racing, maybe camping or skiing. Other than that, he goes once a week to where they live and spends a few hours to take them to dinner, any on-the-spot needed school shopping and usually a movie. They live 1½ hrs from us which is really stressful in that it limits the time together.

Last night we came across outgrown clothes in our closets from just a few years ago when the kids were younger and I saw my husband’s face almost wince. I know he’s sad they aren’t an established “presence” in our house.

@Brian1946 Yup.

I home school my three kids so they are with me for most of their waking hours of most days.

So when do they have quality time?JK jk

oooo I’m hurt ;-p

The weekends in their entirety are blocked off for my children. The early mornings and the late nights are blocked off for my children. During some weekdays, I can pick up my oldest from school and spend a couple of hours homeschooling or, on other days, I can feed him and bring him to the Jewish center. Other nights, I pick both of the kids up from afterschool or pre-school and take them to the park for an hour or so and then spend the rest of the night with them.

Now they have moved out, we all get together one night a week and that is no-technology time while they are there. My daughters and I used to go out once a month for a ‘girls-day-out’. I must make sure we instigate that again. It sort of got sidelined over the last months. I would like to also factor in to do something one-on-one with my son now he has moved out. If my husband and I are going to see a film, an art gallery or even a trip to Sydney or Melbourne, we will quite often invite one (or all) of them along if we think they will be interested. It is nice to spend time with them.

Basically, now they aren’t living at home, we do schedule it to make sure it happens.

As much as is convenient, so long as i’m allowed.
“Okay dad, some alone time would be nice…you know?”