Birthdays

As it gets closer and closer to our kids birthdays and other various holidays we always come back to how we should blend traditions. In Jason's family, birthdays are mini Christmases(mainly because his birthday IS Christmas), in my family they are a big deal but, not that big! His family goes big for every holiday is what I have slowly realized, they do Valentine's Day boxes for the kids, they hide thousands of Easter eggs, even Halloween is huge in his family. My family loves holidays as much as the next family, but we mostly use it as an excuse for us to be together and eat a lot of food. How do you blend the two? Well, it's kind of been decided we'd start our own traditions. Because his kids have been through so much and lost their mom before they should have I decided to keep all of the traditions their mom kept in place and use them for our kids as well. This means on their birthday they get  donuts for breakfast, breakfast delivered to them, a special date with mom and dad-we actually switched it to my kids get a date with me and his kids with him so they know they haven't been replaced, and the whole day is about THEM! When you have nine kids this is vital to make them each feel loved and special, something that people always tell us we could never possibly have any time for. I will admit, it gets hard when you have two sets of twins to spend one on one time with them even with the birthday day dates for the obvious reasons and as they get older we're going to have to work out all the kinks, but for now we just do one on the day before and one on the actual birthday switching off every year so they don't feel unloved by getting stuck with the "unbirthday". I must say though, this is something our kids look forward to every year. My daughter's birthday is in August and she has already told me what she wants to do on our date, what she wants for breakfast, lunch, dinner, desert, and anything else she can think of. It really is that big of a deal to them and I'm glad they have something to look forward to and we look forward to finding more ways to make them feel special on their birthdays-after all they only happen once a year!