2/2/3 schedule - Page 2

[meemee]

we have a 1/1/1/1/1/2. so sunday night ex picks up dd, monday i pick up dd from school, tuesday i drop her and her dad picks her up. so he keeps her t, th, and sunday nights. i pick her up from school on friday and keep her till sunday night. there was never ever any confusion. we did drop offs and pick ups from school/dc.

we've been doing this since dd was 3. and it has worked really well for us. all these almost 6 years. 

however we live kinda in the same neighbourhood. plus ex and i are v. flexible and change our days when needed. if we are busy then the other parent has the first choice of preference of keeping dd. if dd has an event on his day then we either exchange days or he takes her.

the thing is we did not create that schedule. that just naturally happened. and we've pretty much kept to it. i have received soo much flak for this schedule from others around me - esp. the worker when i was on foodstamps. she was so surprised it worked for our family. anything more than that - like week on week off or even 3 days would be too much time away from parents or child. 

the key to this whole thing is choice. and it wasnt ex's or my choice - but dd. if she didnt want to go over to his place he was ok with it. if she wanted to spend another day with him that was ok with me. 

intially there was a lot of changes to the schedule. this worked really well for dd as she learnt that her parents were available to her whenever she wanted it. if she goes 3 days without seeing a parent she misses them. esp. me. summer our schedule changes a lot because i am out of school so i have the flexibility to keep her. plus she has her friends over and we have constant sleep overs. or go to them. mostly a lot of my friends kids spend weeks here. 

absolutely you guys can have dinners together or go to a play or something together. that is the most healthy thing to do. my dd really misses that 

[LKath]

I guess we have a 2-2-1-1-Split schedule, which seems like it would be confusing. So, M/T, kids are with dad, W/Th, they are with me, we alternate Fridays and Saturdays (he has friday one week and I have Saturday), and Sunday we split the kids up so we can have one-on-one time with them. I realize on paper it seems really confusing, but it has worked out well for us. I would prefer to have an entire weekend, but their dad does art-type things and always needs to be somewhere at least one weekend night. The kids are 6 and 4 now and the older one has always kept the schedule straight and helps out his little sister. I believe as they get older, we will go into a more traditional arrangement, but I didn't think the kids would do well without seeing one of us every 2 days or so.

Also, we did the family dinners a lot in the beginning of the divorce/separation. But,then, my ex started seeing someone and now those are kaput. We were amicable, but there are reasons that we are not married. It started to become kind of hard for me to sit through dinner while he was sending and receiving texts from the girlfriend and not reallly paying attention to the kids.  

[turtle2who]

Yes we tried the occasional dinner or activity together in the beginning but realized rather quickly that it was not working out. We were amicable but ds was confused by it. He would suggest we call and invite daddy to things we were doing. Or he'd ask if daddy could come on vacation with us. He also had trouble when it was time for us to go our separate ways. He didn't want to leave the one parent and when we'd say okay you can go with him/her then he didn't want to leave the other parent. It was definitely making it harder for him.  Since we stopped doing that we rarely have that type of issue with him. He understands the "boundaries" much better and is happier.