It’s hard to transition from having custody of your child full time to sharing custody, no matter what specific allocation of time your child’s father gets. Sharing holidays is a challenge, especially when you consider that it means that there will be major holidays that you’ll spend alone. Any deviation from the standard schedule...
Common Custody Issues: His Parenting Time
There are a few issues that seem to pop up again and again and, if you’ve been in family law as long as I have, you’re bound to see it. If you’re going through a divorce or custody case, you may very well come across it, too – which is why I write today. It...
If you’re a woman in the military and you’re getting a divorce, you’re not alone. Though the reverse dynamic – a man as the active duty military service member and a woman as the dependent spouse – is more common, that doesn’t mean that the reverse doesn’t also occur. Plenty of women are active duty...
As much as I’ve written about child support over the years, I think there are still a lot of things that people don’t understand about how it works. Custodial arrangements – or parenting plans – vary dramatically these days, and though it’s true to say that more parents share custody than have primary physical...
After I had my babies, I remember being shocked at how quickly personnel from the hospital came by to make sure that I had arranged to pay my bill, that I knew it wasn’t wise to shake a baby, and to fill out the information needed to complete the birth certificate. I never saw a...
There’s a lot of mystery surrounding our local area judges, and that’s probably especially true in the juvenile court. In case you’re not yet all that familiar with the Virginia court system, most custody cases start in juvenile court – unless they’re part of a larger divorce action (in which case they’d be filed in...
Parenting Plans and Parenting Time These days, its probably safe to say that shared custody is more the norm than primary physical custody, except in cases where the parties agree otherwise. There is no explicit, legal presumption for shared custody in Virginia, though; in fact, the law only provides that the judge should consider “all”...
You’ve been married a really long time. At this point, probably almost every asset (or liability) you can think of is one that was earned, purchased, or acquired during the marriage. While it doesn’t have to be harder to end a longer marriage as opposed to a shorter one, there are often a lot...