How Ryan and His Daughter Stay Connected and Organized With the OurFamilyWizard Calendar
One day Ryan, who was in the middle of a divorce, sat on the couch watching a movie. A character in the movie mentioned a co-parenting app, called OurFamilyWizard, and Ryan sat up straighter. What if an app could make his co-parenting experience easier?
He asked his attorney to get it included in their court order.
Allison was only a baby at the time, so Ryan and his co-parent were just figuring out how to co-parent (and how to parent!). Now, Ryan and his co-parent have been using OurFamilyWizard for 6 years. The features and tools genuinely do make co-parenting easier, especially managing the schedule, Ryan says.
Co-parenting is still not easy—but it’s more manageable, and you can protect yourself better.
Why use a specialized co-parenting calendar?
Although Ryan uses every feature and tool in OurFamilyWizard, the Calendar is one of his favorites. It helps with a lot of things: Practical planning. Staying organized. Staying calm. Always showing up on time.
“I’ll look at my court order, and then I’ll put everything on OurFamilyWizard, even with reminders—just in case life happens, and you’re like ‘Oh, no! I forgot I have Allison today,’ or ‘I forgot that there’s a dance today.’ You know what I mean.”
How to show you’re sticking to the schedule: GPS Check-ins to log pickups
OurFamilyWizard’s Journal feature has a Check-in tool that logs your location (only at the moment you check in). “That was super helpful,” says Ryan. “Like, I logged when I was somewhere waiting for [my co-parent] for me to pick up Allison on schedule.
“It would just help me with tracking different things that happen in my case, in case something pops up and she tries to take me back to court.”
Managing Ryan’s complicated parenting time schedule
Ryan and his co-parent have a detailed parenting time arrangement. His parenting time includes every first, third, and fifth weekend, every other major holiday (odds and evens), every summer break, and every Thursday.
It gets complicated. But it helps a lot to have it laid out on a calendar without doing the work manually. The OurFamilyWizard schedule builder feature takes your parenting time pattern and lays it out on the calendar, so you don’t have to do any math or guessing. Ryan adds, “Then I mirror it to the Office of the [Texas] Attorney General’s parenting time schedule and my court order, to make sure it matches.”
How the Calendar helps Ryan’s daughter feel comforted
Ryan says, “I don’t think her mom uses the Calendar as much as I do, but it is still really useful for me to use it. I’ll print it out, and it’ll have blue for me and red for her, so I can plan out different things.”
The printed Calendar “gives my daughter a good observation of when I’ll be seeing her and when she’ll be seeing me,” says Ryan. “So the Calendar makes it easier for Allison. It makes it easier for me, and I can pre-plan things out. It’s a powerful tool if you can utilize it correctly.
“But if [my co-parent] doesn’t utilize the Calendar, that’s not my problem. I know I can. I know I’m doing it.”
OurFamilyWizard’s co-parenting Calendar offers peace of mind
With a clear parenting time pattern laid out on the Calendar—and printed, for Allison—Ryan feels more comfortable knowing he can maintain their schedule without too much hassle. The OurFamilyWizard Calendar makes the co-parenting situation easier for both Ryan and Allison.
“I've talked to one person that's going through a divorce right now,” Ryan says. “And I told her, ‘Try OurFamilyWizard. It's super helpful and beneficial. It may be beneficial to get it in your court order.’”
We’ve changed the names of the parents and children mentioned in this story to protect their privacy.