Egg's Benedict and Sausage Fondue - Building foundations through traditions
Establishing traditions is important to give your family (blended or not) a foundation that your children can hold on to when things are difficult. This can be tricky when you are combining traditions from multiple families. You have to figure out when to keep traditions when to blend them, when to throw them out and when to create new ones. In this episode, we talk about some of our challenges in navigating traditions in our blended family.
Why Traditions are important
- They give us a foundation to build our lives on
- They give us a sense of roots and belonging
- We asked the kids what they thought
- The Younger kids had a different perspective than the older kids
- They can only remember the traditions that we currently have
- They have some that are doubled up
- Older kids remember
- Some of the traditions when we were still married to their parents. Some we have dropped
- Some of the traditions that we continue to do give them a sense of belonging to this new family
- Building Traditions in Blended Families
- Keep Traditions (Combining)
- Choose one over another
- Creating new ones
Keeping Traditions
- Keeping both traditions for the same event
- Sausage Fondue and Eggs Benedict - combined Christmas breakfast
- Sausage Fondue is from Paige’s first husbands family
- Giving the kids an ornament is from Paige’s first husbands family
- Acting out the Nativity
- Fondue on Christmas Eve
- Easter baskets
- Carving Pumpkins. Only kids like, we wouldn't mind if it went away ;)
Choosing one over another
- Opening Christmas Presents
- opening Christmas presents one at a time
- this took 6 hours the first time to open presents.
- we wanted to be the Disneyland parents the first Christmas. Yes, we tried to buy our kids acceptance of the blended family
- Christmas Dinner
- dropped Darren's typical dinner and went with Paige's
Creating new ones
- We tried a new tradition of going to a tree farm to get a Christmas tree for a few years.
- ended up at home depot to get a tree
- we now have a fake tree.
- Ice cream for dinner (fail, everyone was sick). Dinner for dessert
- Monday night swim parties
- Swimming at Christmas
- Ikea Scavenger Hunt
- Valentine days auction
- Dancing before bed
- Reading Scriptures never really took hold until Dallin challenged us to read scriptures consistently, which is now 5 years and going
- Ice Skating at Christmas every year (No one totally enjoys this, everything hurts and we are cold, but it is fun. ;)
- Cooking competition
The most important thing about Traditions
- It is never too late to start. This is for blended and traditional families
- Some things are kids said:
- Julianne said, “I was a hardcore traditionalist when I was little. If we altered traditions, especially after my parent's divorce, it was hard for me. After our families blended, they were combined and formed so well. I am so grateful for all our fun traditions, especially our new ones. ”
- Jacob said, “Doing fun things together has really made a difference with our family. I see a lack of that with other families”
- Amanda Said, “When it comes down to it, traditions don't really matter, what matters is the meaning behind them, which is being a family and being together and that is where you guys have excelled and made all of us feel so loved and welcomed and part of something bigger than we were before.”
The funny moment this week.
After church on Sunday, we were talking about what we learned. Madeline mentioned Christ taught when someone slaps you, you need to turn the other cheek. As she said this she pretended to slap her brother. He moved at the perfect time and got a good little slap. She then said, "Sam, turn the other cheek!" He, in turn, said that he learned in Church how to control his anger and that he hoped Madeline could learn how to control her anger. It was pretty funny and we all laughed so hard that we could not finish dinner.
Links for this week
