I've posted before about how I feel that my ex is trying to exclude me from my DD's life - by making significant decisions without reference to me, minimising the time she spends with me, demanding additional time beyond the 50:50 arrangement we have and refusing to share information with me etc.
I have a fixed fee one hour appointment with a solicitor tomorrow, and I'm trying to get my thoughts in order so that I can make best use of the time, rather than waffle about things that are outside the scope of legal advice.
My objective from the appointment is to establish what, if any, legal options I have to address my concerns, and I am making a list of "examples" to show the kind of things I mean.
One of the things I want to discuss with her is the possibility of a "right of first refusal" arrangement, like they have in the USA, where if a DC cannot be cared for by the parent who has care, the other parent has the right to be asked if they can provide the care before any other care is arranged.
For my situation, I wondered if this could be put in place for overnight care of DD, particularly when ex is out of the country. There has previously been a situation (which I found out about afterwards) when his then girlfriend picked DD up from school and cared for her overnight on the usual transfer day (transfer is through school), because ex wasn't returning to the UK until the next day. the problem is, because I didn't know that ex wasn't around, and thought that DD was safely in his care, I took a last minute trip to visit a friend, and had there been an emergency that night which required decisions by someone with PR, neither of us would have been easily available to be with DD!
Ex also relies on his parents to provide childcare during the holidays while he is working; but they live several hundred miles away. Now, I realise that it is important that DD spends time with her DGP, and she does; they visit at last once a month for the weekend, and she has been on a two week overseas holiday with them recently - but it seems that she is spending more and more of her time with her DGP rather than her Dad, and as she gets older, she will want to hang out with friends during holidays, not be parcelled off to DGP for weeks at a time. They have also taken her to their family Dr and sought treatment for minor issues while she is with them, which I'm not comfortable entrusting to them, really.
This is particularly an issue for October half term - ex and I agreed the alternate week schedule for the forthcoming Sept term back in April (at his request because he wanted to make plans), and we agreed back then that DD would spend Oct half term with him. Days later, DD told me that her Dad had booked his wedding for the first weekend of half-term and she would have to go and stay with her DGP for the week while her Dad & SM are on honeymoon. I'm sure that by then, she'll have an active school social life and be upset about the idea of having to spend the whole of half term away from her friends - if it was a holiday or something then it would be different, but that's not the impression I get from her - one weekend she was there while her Dad was away, she says she ended up playing monopoly with herself!
Because I'm self-employed from home, I can be very flexible around DD, which ex knows, and tends to use his contrasting full-time employed status as a stick to beat me with.
So, my question, after all of that, is has anyone successfully secured this kind of "first refusal" agreement with their ex - and is it possible to get it legally enforceable, or can it only be by trust/agreement?