Once you've established your general parenting plan, the next step involves determining how to handle holidays, special days, and school breaks. These occasions often require special consideration since they don't follow your regular weekly routine and frequently hold significant emotional importance for families.

Divii allows you to specify particular parenting time arrangements during holidays. This approach works well for parents who prefer clear, written guidelines for special occasions.

For those who prefer visual planning tools, the holiday schedule feature provides an intuitive calendar-based approach to managing special days. This visual method can make it easier to understand how holiday arrangements will affect your overall parenting time distribution.

When planning for recurring holidays like Labor Day, you have a couple options to consider. The first approach involves maintaining your default parenting time schedule, meaning whoever has regular parenting time that day automatically keeps the child for the holiday.

Alternatively, you can choose to suspend your default schedule for Labor Day. This approach means that the holiday becomes neutral territory by default, requiring both parents to communicate and plan together based on their specific circumstances and plans for that particular year.

If you are suspending the default schedule to implement a specific, predetermined change for Labor Day each year you'll need to follow through with the detailed questions in Divii or continue through the holiday schedule to specify exactly what the change would entail.

Many parenting plans include provisions for extending parenting time when a parent already has weekend time adjacent to the holiday. This approach can create longer, more meaningful holiday periods while minimizing transitions for children.

A popular approach involves alternating which parent has the child for specific holidays each year. You can specify whether one parent gets odd years while the other gets even years, creating a fair distribution of specific holidays over the long term.

Some families prefer to designate that one parent consistently has the child for certain holidays every year. This approach works particularly well when parents have different holiday traditions or when logistics make one arrangement significantly more practical.

The notes column in your holiday planning provides space to outline specific details about how you'll handle each day so it's clear how the holidays are divided.

Parents who follow a week-on, week-off schedule often find it practical to maintain their regular schedule for most holidays. Since they already have full weeks and weekends, they can naturally split school breaks evenly without requiring significant adjustments to their routine.

Families with strong communication skills and high levels of mutual trust and respect often prefer flexible approaches to holiday planning. They recognize that it's impossible to predict specific plans years in advance and prefer to maintain the ability to plan together and maximize each parent's time with the children.

Remember that you can approach each holiday on its own. Your family might benefit from being flexible about long weekends while maintaining specific arrangements for major holidays like birthdays, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. The choice is entirely yours based on your family's unique needs and circumstances.

If you choose a generally flexible approach to holidays, its important to be proactive about discussing your holiday plans. It's common for co-parents to schedule regular meetings to discuss and plan upcoming arrangements.

A common and effective approach involves meeting a few times per year for comprehensive planning. For example, some people meet at the beginning of December, focusing on extracurricular registrations and holidays in the first term of the new year and then in August before school starts in September, addressing extracurriculars and special days in the upcoming school term.

This systematic approach ensures that both parents stay informed about important dates and can plan their schedules accordingly, reducing last-minute conflicts and confusion.