I don't generally make posts about my family life asking for opinions, but I'll make an exception in this case because I'm genuinely curious how others might view the situation. I'll apologize in advance for the long post, but some backstory is needed here.
My wife has two sisters, one is 1 year older, the other is about 8 years younger. All her life, growing up, her older sister was the one who got to try everything, was given everything, while my wife was given the "hand-me-down" stuff or nothing at all. My wife's parents were not very well off financially, so when the older sister got her first bicycle for example, there was no first bicycle for my wife, she was expected to learn on and share her sister's bike (which, as you can imagine, didn't lead to her getting to ever ride the bike much.) The same story continued for lessons and activities. The older sister would get to take piano lessons, would end up hating it and quit, but if my wife wanted to take piano lessons, the answer was no, they couldn't afford it.
Anyway, they have a long history of not liking each other, and the older sister (she is 32, my wife is 31) also had a long history of always getting things her way, and getting to do them first. They currently do not speak to each other, but of course they speak to other family members so things get back to one another.
So, backtrack about 2.5 years ago. My wife and I waited until after the 1st trimester to tell everyone that she was pregnant. We were successful the first month we started. Now, we had no idea that her sister was also trying to get pregnant, because they do not talk to each other.
So, long story short, my wife got pregnant first. All the family members were congratulating her, writing messages on Facebook, calling us, etc. Her older sister never said a word of congratulations, no card in the mail, nothing. Then two months later, (after their 1st trimester) they announce that they were pregnant too. Now, my wife and I congratulated them on FB, said our good wishes, etc. Of course, it hadn't gone unnoticed by either of us that her sister or her husband couldn't be bothered to have congratulated us when we had announced. Basically, older sister was pissed that she wasn't first in getting pregnant. She even pushed up the date of her children's birth and had them by C-section almost 4 weeks early. It sounds incredulous to even think that she would do that to try and "beat" my wife, but according to other family members, there was no medical reason why she needed to do that, so... Shrug.
So our daughter was born, and her cousins were born about a month afterward. Now, my wife's parents live in Brazil. So, as soon as we announced that she was pregnant, we started planning on bringing them over to the US so they could see their first grandchild. I found a direct flight from Brazil to Dallas TX. They would get on the plane at night, and wake up and be here in the morning. About as easy as you can make it, it was their first time ever on a plane too, and had never dealt with airports or customs.
Now my sister-in-law wanted them to go to Arizona to see her kids too. So, we agreed we would split the cost of tickets. At this point of course, I'd already been looking at flights for months, and while a direct flight was not the cheapest option, it was by FAR the easiest for her parents. But SIL found flights that had them going from Brazil, to Peru, to Miami, to Chicago, to Dallas. It basically had them flying/travelling for about 28 hours, all for $500 less, where my flight was 11 hours direct. My wife and I, my parents, thought that was absolutely ridiculous, especially since they'd never flown before. If they missed even a single flight due to delays or whatever, that would ruin everything. Did I mention they don't speak any English either? It would be very hard for them to communicate with anyone if something went wrong.
I went ahead and booked the flight I found.
Of course, SIL refused to pay any extra. She eventually paid me half the cost of the flight that she had found. Fine, whatever. Then, she proceeded to try and dictate how long her parents would be staying with us, and how long with them. So out of 6 weeks, she wanted her parents to be there with her for 4 weeks, while we would get two weeks. (The reasoning for this was that she was having twins and my wife was only having one child.)
My wife pretty much blew up at this, and I (having never had much contact with my SIL until this point) really started to see that everything my wife had said about her was correct. Everything went downhill at that point. It took 6 weeks for them to pay for the tickets (they sent the money back with my MIL because they'd be going back to Brazil through DFW) and since she didn't pay her share, we ended up paying the extra $500 and I just let it go.
Anyway, a year goes by and we sent their children birthday presents. Nothing big, but considering they didn't send our daughter anything, it was just something to commemorate their first birthday. Then, we also sent them Christmas gifts, which is just a few weeks afterward. This time, we did get something for our daughter... about a week AFTER Christmas. Our gift had shown up right before Christmas. Obviously, they hadn't planned on getting anything, so they ordered something after the fact and then made an excuse that Amazon had shipped it to their house by mistake, so they were sending it on themselves... Except that the box we received came directly from Amazon, not them.
So fast forward another year, and this time... we didn't send them anything. Not for their birthday, not for Christmas. My wife wants nothing to do with her sister or her husband, and neither do I. But, they did send our daughter a gift this year. We received it two days before Christmas. It was completely unexpected, given their history with our family.
We weren't going to do what they did the previous year and lie and say we bought something and it's coming late. We really just don't plan on having any ties with them anymore, and that includes gifts. That seems like it may be petty on our part I guess, but we're certain that they only sent us a gift because they felt obligated to do so. We must have embarrassed them by sending gifts to their kids while my MIL was there last year and saw them and they had sent nothing.
I'm not a fan of my daughter not being able to have any relationship with her cousins, but in this case, I think it's probably the way to go. So what would you do?
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