Summer Visitation in August Under Standard Possession Order

Intro

Hi, Chris Schmiedeke, from Divorce Simplified, here to talk about August 2021 under the Texas Standard Possession Order. Pretty straightforward month. Should be a quick video. There are only a few exceptions that we will talk about this month.

End of Summer, Beginning of School Term – Thursdays!

As you can see here, we have a visual representation of the month of August 2021. A couple of assumptions I’ve made, I don’t know when your kids go back to school, but I’ve gone ahead and selected August 17th as the return to school date here, it could be the 16th, the 17th, or the 18th. My kids return on the 17th, so I just picked those days. You can see that the Thursdays kick in because those are during the school term.

Final Weekend that Custodial Parent Can Designate for the Summer

Also, this weekend (first Friday of August), could be stolen by the custodial parent if they gave proper notice, 14 days’ notice, or by April 15th, either one of those two. That is a weekend outside the extended summer possession of the non-custodial parent. Those are all discussed in the April, May, June videos that you all may want to go back and review.

There was no 5^th Friday (or Weekend) in July, Here’s Why

There’s one other piece here that I wanted you to see. I’m going to go back to July. I’ve been getting a lot of questions about this. So, you can see the non-custodial parent’s visitation ended July 31st, that’s assuming they did not select custom dates for extended summer possession, they took the default dates of July 1st to July 31st.

Everyone’s asking, “Oh, well, the 31st falls on the fifth weekend,” which is incorrect terminology. We measure our weekends by Fridays. So, we have the first, third, and fifth Friday. So yes, it is the fifth Friday, but the 31st falls on a Saturday.

The point I want to make here is that the visitation schedule should look like a timeline. There are no overlaps and there are no gaps. When one party’s possession ends at 6:00 PM, the other party’s possession begins at 6:00 PM. There are no gaps in there. So, for this to then be the non-custodial parent’s fifth weekend (5^th Friday), which would end (Saturday), it would have had to have ended on Friday at 6:00 PM when the weekend possession starts.

It does not. It ends on Saturday at 6:00 PM. So that would be overlap, right? We cannot have overlap. They’ve got to be a perfectly clean timeline. So, since there’s an overlap into Saturday, this Friday visitation disappears because it should have started at 6:00 PM on Friday. Therefore, August 1st belongs to the custodial parent.

Recap of August 2021 Summer Possession

Other than that, you can see the standard first Friday and third Friday, and then I have the Thursdays kicking in because we know that Thursdays go during the school term. All right, so there you have it. I told you it was a pretty simple month. The kids are going to go back to school at some time in August, so the Thursdays are going to kick in after they go back to school.

You could have a scenario where the custodial parent steals that first weekend outside of the non-custodial parent’s extended summer possession. And then, of course, we reviewed that little hiccup there at the end of July, whether that was actually the fifth Friday visitation, or was that forfeited. Pretty straightforward. If you have any questions, you can comment or you can contact us at all of the information that I will put down here. Thank you. See you next month.