How much time to you set aside for your family to spend with them?

I don’t particularly have a large family and now live with friends, but I do set aside time to spend with my sister. It doesn’t have to be doing anything special but I like to make sure it’s just me and her unninterupted so that we can just go ahead and talk ourselves silly.

It’s only the 3 of us here (well technically 2 for now), so it’s not too hard to spend time together as a family. The rest of our family is miles away. We eat dinner together at the table each night. We have movie nights about once a week. We’ll take little trips to the zoo or amusement park on the weekends. We also have game nights where we just sit and relax with some snacks and play games.

When we lived closer to the rest of our family, we would have family dinners once or twice a month. We also had game weekends about once a month as well. For those, we’d have a lot of people get together at one place and we would spend most of the weekend playing games and having a good time (that’s actually how my husband and I got together).

Spending time with the kids is not an issue. I’m home with them all of the time, except when they are at school. Getting my husband involved is a bit harder, because he has a crazy work schedule. He’s really good about being with the kids when he’s home, and will get them involved in whatever he’s doing. We eat dinner together at the table every night, at least one of us is always available for their school functions, and on the weekends we make sure to plan at least one family event, whether it’s a hiking trip or Nerf gun war in the back yard.

We also see my husband’s relatives regularly. His parents and sister live very close to us, and he has other family within an hour’s drive that we see often. Someone is always planning some kind of event, so being with family isn’t an issue for us. We just don’t see my family often because they all live many states away, and for some reason expect us to drag the kids halfway across to country to visit them instead of them coming to visit us. :( It’s OK though, they are all crazy!

The real challenge is for my husband and I to get to spend time alone together. To manage this, we stick to an early bedtime for the kids and are very strict about it. We try to get out to dinner every now and then, or ask his mom to babysit so we can go to a movie. It’s nice to know that we always have evenings together at least!

I don’t really set aside time with my family. Time just sort of happens. Like we are usually together from dinner until it is time to go to bed everyday. Usually we just talk and tell eachother about our day. Sometimes my parents will watch a movie. Sometimes I will too but its never that interesting.

I live at home still – I can get away from my family ;)

In all seriousness, we do spend a good deal of time together. Our favourite thing to do together is go to our grandmum’s house and play card games as our uncle throws food on the barbecue. We spend all major holidays together and find excuses to celebrate. I still talk to my mum about almost everything going on in my life. My brothers and I are closer than any other friends we have. We hang out quite often.

It’s becoming more difficult now that my older brother works (we missed him over the winter holidays – that was the worst.) And it will only get more difficult. I’m going to enjoy every last second I can :)

I have a lot of family so I try to see at least one family each week some more often. Oldest lives out of state so I’m lucky if I see them twice a year.

Barely.