My kids are getting older, which means winter break looks different here. Sniff.
Of course, we’ll still be decorating cookies and mushing together the family clam dip. (It’s a Breitenstein thing.)
But Christmas Eve, we’ll have three different pickups of three different kids: two teenagers have gone for more fun with relatives this week, and my oldest–the Marine–arrives from Camp Pendleton.
Question: Are you the fun parent?
I am not.
Valentine’s Day for kids: I 100% get the dilemma.
How can you make it special, make them feel loved–when you’re just trying to get kids to eat mashed potatoes with a fork, or get their shoes on the right feet?
Random avatars of sugar and carbohydrates currently sprawl across my table, and I recently did the Sam’s Club pickup with holiday snacks to feed four teenagers.
Which is to say, never, ever enough. And I need price-club-sized tubs of things like salsa and cheese dip.
I’ve been noodling on ideas for kids on holiday break for years, people. But picky teenagers really up the ante, y’know?
Confession: My heavenly intentions for Thanksgiving are often clobbered by my oh-so-real life.
I would love to be preparing our hearts all month for gratitude, but I find myself picking up someone else’s rank gym socks. I would love to be stuffing a jar with slips of paper declaring our thankfulness, but can tend to stave off a little more teenage complaining instead…?
Since 2020 is on its way out, it apparently needed to swipe one more holiday. Go big or go home, right? Or just stay home. Alllll year. “Home for Christmas” may not have the same ring when you’ve been home for Easter, home for Thanksgiving, home for everything!
But in all honesty, though I sorely miss our extended family, I continue to find a lot of hidden gifts in a year with overt, sadness and fear.
Like so much of 2020, there are parts of Thanksgiving this year that are a bit sad. We’ve canceled our family trip for reasons you can probably guess (thank you, COVID).
But this year continues to fling doors wide open in raising resilient kids.
The English teacher of my junior year could have, at varying points in the year, landed squarely in both “Wisest Writing Mentor” and “She Needs a Pat on the Back…Off a Cliff” categories.
She scrawled Blah over my paper titles. Castigated my writing publicly. Scoffed at my conclusions.
So like it or not, we’re all homeschooling now, right?
I personally was World’s Most Reluctant Homeschooler…until surprisingly, I ended up loving it. I even learned some things about my own strengths and passions I wouldn’t have known. (My kids eventually transferred with relative smoothness to public school.)
That very well may not be you. You might just be looking for ideas so your child, the walls, and the permanent markers stay socially distanced.
Back in high school, I took a crazy-cool trip with an organization, performing evangelistic street theater as we camped through Europe. It was unforgettable.
But I’m sure it was no easy feat. Our team consisted of 90 teenagers (not a typo). Tents were lined up with military precision, and meals were planned down to the number of boxes of macaroni and the packets of oatmeal.
In a similar spirit, free time wasn’t called free time, but “O Time”: Organized time. As in, be intentional. Don’t fritter it away.
![Now You're Speaking My [Love] Language](https://www.janelbreitenstein.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/love-languages-text-1.jpg "Now You're Speaking My [Love] Language")
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