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[quote=Anonymous]Last summer my parents, siblings and siblings' spouses and kids all came to visit for a week. 7 days. 4 people stayed at our house and the rest stayed elsewhere but came over to our house every morning and spent all day every day with us. Never. Again. Even my kids were sick of having people here by the end, and they love seeing their cousins, aunts & uncles, and grandparents generally.

While I will [b]never[/b] do such a thing again and even get kind of panicky thinking about it now, I do think some things we did made it more bearable than it would have otherwise been. 
1) A few weeks before the "reunion" I sent an e-mail to everyone with meal plans for the week. Roughly, night 1 (arrival day): spouse and I provide dinner, night 2: sibling 1 and spouse are responsible for dinner, night 3: sibling 2 and spouse, night 4: parents, etc. For breakfast/lunch/snacks and misc items, I created a grocery list on anylist app and shared it w/ everyone so they could put whatever items they wanted on the list and then I sent a splitwise out where everyone contributed $ to the grocery bill.
2) In that same e-mail, I shared a list of ideas of outings/activities for the week with the plan that we would do 1 thing each day (museum, zoo, pool, hike in the woods, etc.) If someone wasn't up for an activity that the rest of the group was doing, obviously they could opt out and stay home/entertain themselves (i wasn't forcing anyone to go on these outings) but there were no days where we all just sat around the house all day. 
3) Every afternoon I instituted a rest time for my kids/myself/my spouse where we basically locked ourselves in our rooms and had screen time or read a book or whatever for an hour or 2 and the rest of the group could do what they wanted. 
4) Every night my kids and spouse and I went to bed a lot earlier than we do when people are not visiting and again, it was to have time alone, not necessarily actually go to bed early.
5) My kids didn't have to be there the whole time (if they got invited to a play date or wanted to go over to a neighbor's house last minute, I wasn't going to say "no, we have company" like I normally do when people visit). They needed breaks.
6) My spouse and I went out alone 2x. We had babysitters! Usually I feel like I have to be there all the time hosting but this week was different and we needed the breaks so felt no guilt taking them.[/quote]

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