This year will be the 16th Thanksgiving my husband and I have been married and the eighth one we’ve had to celebrate separately because of geographic separation. While our sons and I look forward to spending Thanksgiving in Dallas with dear friends while my husband is deployed, it reminds me of how our military lifestyle has shaped and molded us into what spending the holidays together looks like for military families. You make the most of whatever situation you’re in at the moment!

I can count on one hand how many times in my childhood I didn’t go to my grandparents’ house for Thanksgiving. One year was when my little brother had chicken pox, and the other was when the roads were too bad to travel because of the snow and ice. The older I get, the more I find myself longing for time spent with loved ones and how drastically different my children’s lives have been from that of my own or my husband’s lives growing up in big, non-military families.

My parents still live in the same loving home in which my siblings and I were raised. My brother, sister, and their families all live within a 17-mile radius of one another in western Kentucky (besides my college-aged niece who is a senior at Rhodes College in Memphis—love you, Alsie). Not to mention extended family within an hour as a bonus. Home, to my family nucleus, is my parent’s home—Pa and Mimi’s—and we look forward to any occasion where we can travel to Christian County during a long school break, holiday, or summer.

We’re fortunate to only have a 9-hour drive from South Carolina to Kentucky, so being blessed with the luxury to travel back home has not gone unappreciated these past 2.5 years as we’ve lived overseas and in Texas, making it very difficult to travel with four children. As the boys mature and look forward to new experiences and adventures, making plans to travel home and spend time with our families is at the top of the priority list.

With each deployment, PCS, training, school, and more that we encounter, we try and find the silver lining and make decisions based on the growth and development of our family. To make sure it aligns with our family values.

At the end of our Army journey, holidays will most certainly look different, but the most important thing is that we’ll do our best to spend sacred time together, whether that be with our little family or spending it with our family at home with Pa and Mimi.

Until that day, I’ll thank my lucky stars I had the childhood that I did—holiday clockwork—and my children’s childhoods looking forward to new adventures and living with the flexibility to make holidays work for us, no matter where we spend it.

Just as long as we’re together.