A Natural Family

Well, the last of our family leaves today. It has been quite a whirlwind of families, emotions, presents, and fun the past ten days or so. We had 12 adults + 2 babies at my enormously long awesome dining table for Christmas dinner.

Now it is time for J and I to get back to real life. I am at work this morning. J is back to teaching a Winter Session class at RU. Emadu will have to adjust back to a much quieter house and playing by himself (sometimes...). J and I already started talking about getting back to the envelope system of money management. An envelope of cash for monthly groceries, one for our weekly allowances, etc... This semester will be much tighter as I am only working 30 hours and J isn't on fellowship anymore and is only teaching one class as an adjunct. Sad to say, he may be back to doing Kaplan training which I know he isn't wild about. But--it will even things back out so that we are both working a close to equal amount outside of the house. And, it will mean that we both get to have a good amount of time at home with Em and each other.

Our six year anniversary is this weekend. Sweet.

So, my question to you, oh blogworld, is how does a family of three do all the traveling that is required to keep up with family and friends in far off places while having a limited number of vacation days and limited fundage resources?? Here are the trips we'd like to make in the next few months:

Florida (grandparents who still haven't gotten to meet Emadu in the flesh)

California (friends as close as family who also haven't gotten to meet our boy--including our goddaughter)

Arkansas (parents)

Colorado (friends having a baby in the spring)

Tennessee (friends having a baby in January)

Michigan (family who haven't met Emadu)