Holiday Visitation Issue?
I'm a new step mom....and honestly have nobody to vent too....thankful for this website....
I have a question about holiday visitation. But here is a tiny bit of background info….
My husband’s ex wife was upset and caused a lot of drama and problems when we first started dating. We are now married and the problems have still continued. It got out of control and to the point it was affecting his son emotionally so we hired an attorney to modify the court orders and develop a parenting plan. The main point was to make things easier for his son. We still have not come to an agreement on some of the parenting plan. The visitation schedule they set up through their divorce is basic. My husband has every other weekend and a few hours during the week. For holidays, it is written out that they are to be alternating. The holiday visitation is written out in pretty good detail…it’s just the basic one that the court system does. My husband has asked her for more time but she has never allowed it. Because of all the drama that has come about, the attorney told my husband to go by the papers for visitation so there are not any issues. Since attorneys have been involved my husband has followed the visitation schedule exactly how it is written in their divorce papers.
Now…..for the holidays. This year, my husband will have Thanksgiving and ½ of Christmas day and she will have Christmas Eve and morning. His ex is demanding that they split the holidays instead of alternate. They have split them in the past. We decided since we are spending Thanksgiving with my family…that lives 2 hours away that we would just alternate holidays and not have him next year. My husband told her that he will be going by what the papers say and she became upset. She said she will be talking to her attorney.
I don’t have a lot of experience with family court and these issues……are we in the wrong for wanting to alternate holidays? That is what they agreed on when they divorced. Is it better to split holidays?
What else could her attorney do but petition to modify the divorce decree....?
What TAN said. Follow that
What TAN said. Follow that CO to a T. BM doesnt like it? Too F'in bad.
Follow the court order. Plain
Follow the court order. Plain and simple. Oh, and drama free, for an added bonus!
Stick with it and her
Stick with it and her attorney will tell her she has no leg to stand on here. Do not waiver or give her an inch. She will come back and be accomodating when her lawyer tells her no. Do not give on anything or she will use it against you in the future.
sometimes following a court
sometimes following a court order is just not relaxing and takes all the fun out of christmas and other holidays too so
this is what we do at our house and it works out rather nice i deal with a BM who always wants to control the holidays.
first always try to schedule the same time with both sets of kids my bios and DH kid but when it don't work out we just do christmas early. now that kids are older its even easier but even when they were younger we used to tell them santa knows you have two houses to go to this weekend and he made a special arrangement to come to our house early... kids believe anything. we would put out the cookies and everything...
the fun thing was we still were able to tell kids to get to bed early and then we would have christmas morning when we woke up on chritmas eve day then spend day with kids and they would go to other parent christmas eve night....
this way nothing was spoiled, kids had fun and adults had fun and less rushing around and no stress...
i think the BM of DH child was annoyed that we came up with this idea because santa made a special arrangement to come to our house first!!!