I've got an upset stomach already, and Thanksgiving's a week away.

When I was a kid, we spent the whole day at my house. It was always a great holiday filled with special food we only got once a year (my mom used to grind up walnuts, mix them with cream cheese and stuff celery with it), televised parades and hauling the Christmas decorations up from the basement.

As much as I loved Thanksgiving at home with my parents and sister, I was always kind of jealous of my friends who went to the homes of their grandparents on the holiday. The only grandparent of mine I ever knew was my maternal grandmother, and she died a couple of weeks before with 9th birthday. My mom wasn't close to her brothers and my dad was raised in foster homes and his siblings were scattered from coast to coast, so we didn't have aunts, uncles or cousins to visit.

For many, many years it was just the four of us.

Well, now I'm married ... to a man who has an extended family whose sheer volume blows my mind.

Both his grandmothers are still alive. There are several aunts, uncles and cousins. There are second and third cousins, great-aunts and great-uncles. There are family friends who are so close to my in-laws that we count them as family.

Come the holidays, everyone wants a piece of us. To add insult to injury, my nearly-18-year-old daughter has a steady boyfriend, so now we have to share her with his family.

For weeks, my husband and I have been trying to come up with a way to split 12 hours between our families fairly. Since we live several hours away from both sides, time is at a premium. Neither his parents nor my mother and stepfather wanted to have dinner the day after Thanksgiving and not on the holiday.

My husband's paternal grandfather died in August, so this is Grandma's first Christmas without Grandpa. It's rough on her, so of course we want to be there for her. I've tried to be understanding, but Grandma has always been the travel agent for guilt trips, and the mere mention of the fact that we may not be with my husband's side of the family all day on Thanksgiving sent her into full-blown hissy fit.

My mom is quieter about things. If you tell her something she doesn't want to hear, she will begin speaking in monotones and the underlying disapproval in her voice will become evident over the more than 200 miles between us.

After weeks of phone volleying, we finally nailed things down. We'll go to my mom's in the morning. Dinner is at 12:30. If we leave her house at 3:30 p.m., we can be back in Fort Wayne to my in-laws' by 5 p.m. for dinner there.

I'm tired and nauseous just thinking about it.

I am so very thankful for my family ... all of them. I just wish Thanksgiving spanned a few days.