Is there any wording you regret or detail you wished you'd included?
Hi – thought I’d throw a few insights from our experience here in case it helps.
My husband has three children from a previous relationship. Court orders were signed four years ago after a year of legal backwards and forwards between my husband and his ex. They have a fairly vanilla situation without quite as much complexity as other cases, so apologies if these seem trivial compared to other examples.
Things I wish we included:
We really tried hard to get alternating Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Boxing Day as a solid block every year over the line, but the mother was adamant that changeover should always occur at 4pm on Christmas Day.
That one factor of the court orders really controls so much of what we’re able to do around the Christmas period. My husband’s mother lives two hours away, and my parents live even further away than that, so we really have to be creative (and have a full tank of petrol) if we want to share the day with either of them but still get the children back to their Mother’s for the 4pm handover. The kids are usually so exhausted I often wonder if they even stay awake for dinner with the maternal family. Then the reverse happens the following year when we receive the children at 4pm.
Think hard about this point and what arrangement is going to serve the children’s best interests. A parents’ need to see their children on Christmas day doesn’t feel like a good enough reason to create such havoc.
We have similar challenges for the arrangements for Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. The children spend from 6pm the Saturday night before through to 6pm on the day with each parent on their respective day.
Depending on where we’re at in the fortnightly cycle (5/9), this can mean the children are being shunted for overnights during the course of one weekend multiple times, creating busy households at each end.
In hindsight, rather than have an extra overnight, I think we would have been better to have a day-spend arrangement instead, from 9/10am to 5pm.
And lastly, I understand the logic of the 5/9 cycle (us 5, the mum 9) where we have one night in one week, then four nights in the second, but I often wonder if it would have been wiser to do five nights in one solid block. Sometimes the one-night-a-week cycle is so frenetic and fast that the kids have barely arrived before they’re getting ready to go back to mum’s place.
Things we included that do work:
We don’t factor in birthdays for either the children or the parents – it’s just whoever has care at the time in the normal cycle. That was a deliberate decision by the parents, and I think it was a stroke of genius. We have enough stress and extra logistics to manage making every Christmas day work, it would really add to the mental and emotional load if we had to shuffle for another five birthdays each year.
Handover wording: we were very specific about this. Prior to the court orders, mum would often turn up much earlier than the agreed pick-up time to collect the children from our house and a chaotic panic would ensue, as the kids frantically gathered up their things while mum impatiently beeped her horn outside. Those goodbyes were terrible.
Now, where handover doesn’t occur as part of school, our orders are clear that Dad is responsible to drop the children to Mum’s at the end of his time, and vice-versa. That way we control the last few minutes of their time with us, and it’s not stressful or rushed.
