2 more days of school for SD5 and then she will be on summer break. DH's parenting time order simply states "reasonable parenting time as the parties agree". We have always been successful in creating our own parenting plan...but as SD5 ages and we ask for more and more time it is always nerve racking because you just can never be confident how BM will react. BM is a great mom, loves her daughter, and sincerely misses her when she's gone. She does on the other hand realize that DH misses her too and that SD misses us terribly and she knows that it's only fair that she give us more time in the summer. We are very active in school and extra curricular so we see SD all the time during the school year. EOWend only during summer is horrible and we dont ever want to do that again!

I thought about this for several days before presenting it to her and I decided to address the extra time in the following way. MI parenting guideline says that summer parenting time should be 4 weeks in the summer. If you aligned them with EOWend it would actually be an additional 20 days. So instead of thinking of the time as weeks...I proposed days. We asked for one full week...last week of July. That's 5 days down. Then we asked for 2 additional days added to our EOWend...so now instead of Fri night to Sun night we will have her Thur night to Monday night...for 6 weekends...thats 12 days. That gives us 17 extra days total. I'm happy with that. More importantly BM was happy with it. I am also excited that she agreed to sign her up for girl scouts...which I have been suggesting since the beginning of this past school year...and she will be taking a dance class which will be on Monday...so BM and I will be able to alternate taking her. I am so excited about this summer...especially since I will be working from home starting in July.