Hi. I seemed to have opened a can of worms here. Thanks for supportive messages.
The only advice I can give re the Christmas issue is the same as given by aloha. This is exactly what we do - alternate Christmas and New Year and it does seem to work. The ex spends always spends Christmas with her large family, so is not alone. It means that we all know where we stand and don't have to face tricky negotions. It's always worth considering mediation to help work these things through. I think there is a cost involved, but nothing on the scale of going to court and it helps to have an impartial third party to keep the peace.
Responding to an earlier message from aloha re holidays. We do try and sort the holidays out in advance , but ex is not one for forward planning. It would make so much more sense if she did go away when we had sd - almost four weeks over the summer this year. Maybe she did, but now feels the need to go away again. We have tried different approaches and this summer worked much better than usual, but that was partly because I was at home so didn't need to arrange to take time off. It is frustrating, but the ex will never change as it's not in her nature to be organised.
Cuppy - I know exactly how you feel. We always have to fit in with what the ex wants and it's often last minute. We used to have a really annoying situation where she wanted us to have sd every friday night, saturday and saturday night and then drop her back on Sunday. We put up with this for three years, but it was always really disruptive as it always felt as if sd was visiting and not really part of our home. It also meant that we could never go away at weekends . If we asked the ex to have sd on a Saturday she would accuse dp of not wanting to see his daughter, yet if we asked her if we could have her for a whole weekend she made a fuss about that too. We now do alternate weekends which is much, much better for everybody and sd always knows where she is going to be. The ex does still try and change things and get us to have her on her Saturdays from time to time, but I always suggest that we have her for the entire weekend and swap the weekends around.
Reading all of your messages makes me realise that we have a reasonably good set-up as we don't have much problem with sd. There have been real problems in the past and I know how awful that can be, but things are pretty good these days. We never let her know what we feel about her mother, but she does know that there is a big difference in the way we run our lives. The ex will always be there and will always annoy us, but I think it's all just exacerbated by the fact that I haven't had more than a four-hour stretch of sleep in 7 months.
Good luck to you all with your Christmas problems. I hope some of them get resolved. It's our first Christmas with ds and we will have sd too, so will be very exciting. I can't imagine what it must be like not having your child around over Christmas.
I'm hoping ds will be sleeping by then. We are going to sleep clinic, which is what prompted me to post on Friday, as they asked if I had any problems! I didn't really want to go into it with them, but realised that I had a lot of resentment building up and needed to vent it.