I had a really bad holiday week. I have a 1.5 year old toddler and I thought I had planned a good mix of going to see family, staying home, and hosting stuff, but looking back I just see that every weekend since the first week in December, I’ve been carting my son around to people’s birthday parties, holiday meals (my parents are divorced so we spend a lot of time seeing a lot of family members), cleaning to host people, etc. We haven’t had a single weekend to ourselves and now it’s the end of the holidays and I’m exhausted. I wish my husband had another day off where we could just relax. We were in the city this weekend seeing his family so I had to spend today catching up on cleaning so I won’t be overwhelmed during the week, I couldn’t even eat dinner with my family I was so busy.

I feel defeated and I’m wondering is this just what’s normal for moms? I used to love the holidays but I feel too tired and overextended to plan nice holiday meals or decorate so our house is just barely decorated, our Christmas tree is like 1.5 feet tall, I didn’t make a nice meal for Christmas Day, New Year’s <a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.glow.android.eve">Eve</a> or New Year’s Day, it’s like a regular weekend. We bought our son a slide and a baby vacuum for Christmas but we gave them to him as soon as we got them in the mail, so we ended up not having anything for him to open from us on Christmas morning. I know he doesn’t even know it’s Christmas and I didn’t want to spend $ on stuff he doesn’t need just to have him open something, but I feel like such a lazy and bad mom.

I want to just go on vacation somewhere next year for the holidays so I can actually enjoy it. I may or may not invite my in laws or my family. I just don’t want to cook, clean, or go to someone’s house. My toddler has a ton of energy and I’d love to just be somewhere like Disney World or some resort that has activities for kids and pools so we can have fun. Has anyone done that and was it enjoyable or did you miss being home?