Hello.
I have a situation that I am not sure how to handle…
I am the primary care giver of my baby daughter and was granted Full custody at the Tempoary court hearing. Her father has visitation and is pursuing Joint Custoday. Our court date is not set until November.
He purposely set the date in Nov. vs. Oct. for permanent custody knowing that my family wanted to go on a DisneyWorld vacation all together in October with grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, etc. He has visitation on Mon and Thurs from 4-9pm that week and he has made claim that he absolutely will not allow our daughter to go on the vacation due to his visitation even though I offered that he make up the 2 nights before our trip or when it is convenient for him.
The only clause in the order is that neither of us move 30 minutes away from one another- nothing about vacation yet…
Is there anything that I can file or do so that she can go with me as I won’t go without her obviously and Ill be very sad if we couldnt attend with the rest of the family…please advise.
If your vacation interferes with his visitation under the temporary order, you could be held in contempt if you do not allow him visitation during his time.
I am not an attorney
I would imagine you would have a couple of options, aside from not going…
- File a motion for exception to the visitation (if that even exists)
- Ask for forgiveness, not permission. What I mean by this is you could just go on the vacation. Sure, the ex could bring it up in court, and you could apologize to the courts for violating the order, and explain that you had attempted to re-schedule his visitations to make sure he didn’t miss out, and that he refused. You could also possibly argue that he knew about this vacation well in advance, and was purposefully refusing to work with you because he wanted to try to ruin the vacation.
Option #2 is risky, and like Erin said, you COULD be held in contempt of the court’s order. You just need to decide if you’re willing to take that risk.
I wonder if it is possible to file a motion, asking the courts to order that he work with you to get his allotted amount of time, but not during the week you have vacation planned. The courts generally like to be reasonable, and the fact that this is a well-planned (in advance) family vacation, the courts may not like his blatant refusal to work with you on visitation for that ONE week.
I would imagine that you’d have time to file a motion and get it signed…if they allow such motions. Just make sure if you’re doing it all pro se, that you also file a proposed order for the judge to sign…they won’t write their own.
Good luck!