>We Are Family

In a perfect world. Punky and Bruiser would take a short walk to see them, and would think of Grandma and Grandpa’s house as their second home. We would all have meals together frequently, borrow eggs from each other, go on shopping trips and work on projects.

But it’s not a perfect world. My parents and grandmother live four hours away, and I see them a few times a year. And I hate it.

That’s where my blogs really come in handy. My extended family gets an authentic glimpse into our day-to-day lives here. I’ll be honest, many of the pictures I share on this blog are posted largely with them in mind.

But it’s a one-way street. While they have a window into my existence, I have no way of seeing into theirs. I miss my parents. I love when we get to spend time together, but it always makes me regret that we don’t all live in the same city. When I was young, it didn’t seem like that big of a deal. But now that I have a family of my own, I have come to the age-old realization that family is everything, and the more family you can surround yourself with (within reason, I mean), the better.

And so, watching my children interact with their grandparents and great grandmother this weekend has been bittersweet.

Because they love them. They adore them. And they don’t see them enough.

I make do with pictures. I capture the evidence of their adoration so that my children can see and remember it forever. And when I see my parents, I give them stacks and stacks of pictures of our lives, so that they can see all that their grandchildren have been up to in their absence.

My husband and I both regret that our children are growing up without a single grandparent in this town to call their own. It’s the way of the world now to live far away from extended family.

But both of us think there was something to the old days, when grown children didn’t stray far from their parents. There was something to growing up thinking of your grandmother as a second mom. There’s very little more comforting to a child than her grandparents.

My children are too young now to miss their grandparents when they’ve gone back home.

But I miss them desperately on their behalf.

This post originally appeared on Parents.com.