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Holidays can bring forth a multitude of feelings, emotions, and often increased time with family. As a busy and blended family, your family may feel pressure when attempting to ensure valuable time is allocated with your loved ones. Let’s dive into possible suggestions on how to proactively find ways to bond as a busy blended family during your next anticipated holiday break.

Introduction

Planning for Holiday Break

If your family comprises of shared custody, unique living arrangements, busy work schedules, planning activities for the upcoming holiday break may be rather difficult and even exhausting. First thing is to determine all factual information regarding everyone’s whereabouts and ultimate availability during the upcoming break. Planning ahead is key! Therefore, your busy blended family can begin the true planning.

Secondly, ask your family questions regarding what the holiday break would look like. Some questions worth asking may include:

1. Would the family and I like to partake in bonding activities more so at home?
2. Are we aiming to take a small vacation?
3. If not a vacation, are we going to take day trips?
4. Are we going to visit extended family during the break or incorporate activities around extended family?
5. What are activities our kids envision doing?

For me personally, I find that I aim to capture a mixture of the above. I specifically try to ensure the break has moments for relaxation, moments of fun and exploration outside the home, catching up with extended family either leading up to the holiday break or following the holiday break, and lastly, ensuring that our girls do at least one thing that peaks their interest or desires.

Be sure to remain practical and flexible as well. Holidays tends to bring a whirlwind of emotions based on what is conveyed through social media and what bonding involving your conventional or traditional family. Train your mind to value the quality spent with loved ones and not to hyperfocus on the time lost and ” number of days spent ” as a whole.

Holiday Game night

What are some activities that can be done at home? Game night is always a guarantee fun time for your busy blended family. Minute to win it games, classic board games, and silly creative games could be possible options for your family’s game night. Families find themselves laughing, letting the guards down, and ultimately, being entirely present.

Scrapbooking and dessert

Before the close of the current year, maybe schedule a day or evening to sit together over dessert to create a family album with photos comprised of the recent year. Looking back and reflecting on experiences can lead to great conversations, laughs, and possibly other emotions. From a task related point of a view, it’s a task that you can finally achieve collaboratively as a family. Scrapbooking can be tedious for one person but, with the help of family, it’s less arduous.

I consider myself to be a very sentimental person and I VALUE photos AND MEMORIES. Don’t put off what you can easily do again with intention and planning.

Family Outing

My family aims to partake in at least one scheduled family outing during the holiday break. Over the years those outings have included: train rides, trips to the aquarium, taking in a live show or production, heading to an outdoor garden, or eating out at a favorite place. We also ensure that the outing is something that everyone can enjoy given the various ages we have in our family.

Your family is encouraged to use some of the suggested outings.

Carve in Slow days

It is imperative to include some slow days during your family’s scheduled holiday break. Your kiddos could benefit from sleeping in a day or two or not having any where to be. It allows them to have some autonomy of their time to relax, partake in leisure activities of their choice, and simply just be lazy. Honestly, the entire family could benefit from slow days as it allows to recenter. I use slow days to work on in home projects, binge watch some favorite shows and just RELAX! Slow days are so beneficial for a busy blended family!

Conclusion

Holiday break will look differently across busy and blended families. Planning allows to creatively think of ways to carve out time to be with family. Don’t look at the amount days spent but rather focus on the moments and ultimate memories that will be created in the time spent together. Remain flexible , practical, and ensure activities are geared for everyone involved. Incorporate some intentional time to relax and rest. Your entire family has been on the go and are deserving to reset. I would love for you to share your thoughts regarding this related article down below. Be sure to be on the lookout for new and exciting reads my busybees.