With my daughter now a fully-fledged *person* (she’s 3, no longer a baby or even a toddler!) I’ve been finding that the feeling of what our family is has really solidified.  That is to say, I don’t feel like a new mom anymore.  There are times when I still want advice, but those times seem less urgent, less all-consuming than those heady days when I was more unsure of what I was supposed to do, and needed reassurance that I wasn’t going to break my baby or something. I feel confident.  Comfortable, even.  We’re learning to find our rhythm.

This has a trickle-down effect with other aspects of life, too.  When it comes to the holidays, for example, I find that the idea of traveling to see people isn’t something I’m all that keen on.  I love our extended families, but the thought of waking up in our own beds, making our own food, and settling into our own holiday routine is so appealing.  For years, we’ve traded holidays back and forth between families, traveling hither and yon, and now that our daughter is three, it feels like the family we most want to cozy up with is our little tiny one.

And that gets to the heart of it.  We want to create our own traditions, our own routines around the holidays.  And by staying home, we get to do that.  It doesn’t feel like we’re practicing anymore for the future — the future is now, little family!  We have our special Christmas Eve Feast, something that’s unique to both of us (not something we did growing up).  We have our gift routines (we’ve been doing the “something you want, something you need, something to wear, something to read” business for two years so far and really like the way it focuses and limits our gift-giving).

There are still times when I fantasize about the routines we’ll make in the future (the Harry Potter bedtime chapters, the family weekend camping trips) but I like that deciding to do the holidays at our own home gives us a chance to settle into a family rhythm and set up traditions now, too.

And I get it — some families have more traditions you *want* to share in as a big passel o’ people than others (and some families are more accepting of a change in routine than others, too).  But I’m just here to say, it’s been really relieving to not have to think about splitting everything up like so many slices of pie.  It feels good to let go of our childhood routines and create new ones.  We’ll see each other when we see each other, extended-family-wise, of course; but we don’t have to smash it all into a certain number of hours for the time spent together to “count.”  We can get together the week before, the week after, we can spread out the joy.

More than anything, as I think about settling into our holidays as a family, doing our own thing, I realize that this makes me glad because it doesn’t feel like I’m going through motions, thinking of how things will be different in the future.  I mean, they will be, but I don’t want to spend our time as a family with a little kid trucking hither and yon, longing for the time when we could just not.  We can settle in now.  We can do this!  We can say no to extensive travel, no to multiple locations in a day, no to trying to squeeze every possible experience in.  We are the adults.  We get to decide how we spend this precious, little time together that we have, knowing that nobody really knows how things will look the next year, or the year after that.  So we’re embracing the holiday we want now.  We’ll honor other people on different days, but this holiday — this year — is going to be ours.

The best way to find a rhythm is to start making one.