Thanks for the replies. If I lived thousands of miles away, week + trips would make sense to me, too. We just live a few hours up I-75, and we try to work around school breaks for trips, so most trips are really just Thursday night to Tuesday type trips. We have done the full week + weekends trips in the past, but it seems to get harder every year, as kids get older and busier.
I don't get nearly as many PTO days in my current job as the last one, so I leverage the heck out of long weekends and work travel bolt-ons when possible.
When we take "long" family vacations, we tend to do break it in to 2 parts. Our family will arrive 2-3 days early, and just enjoy time for us. The grandparents, brothers, etc, whoever it is, arrive later and we have the larger group.
We tend to get down there in February, March or April, August, October, Nov or Dec. One trip is usually a full week with grandparents. The others are typically Thursday-Monday or Tuesday trips.
We head to Apalachicola for a weekend in May, then to the beach with the other side of the family in June or July.
We try to get one last trip somewhere before school starts back, could be anywhere. This year we are going to the Polynesian!
I guess the bottom line is we take mostly bite-size trips.