As a step mother and mom, it gets very confusing for adults who deal with my children to know who I am (sometimes our last names don’t match) It is also confusing to them to know where my children are when as we share custody and visitation. When the children were younger we wanted their coaches, friend’s parents, and others involved in their lives to have easy access to our names, how to contact us, and to make it easy for them to know who to call.
Because five year olds have trouble knowing one number much less two, we developed a calling card for each of our children. It had their name, told where she lived M-F, our contact numbers, and addresses. Her natural father’s name and contact numbers for 1,3,5th weekends, and her email contact which worked at both houses. It also had on the back of the card her specific allergy that might needed to be known when visiting and emergency numbers for backup. It was a stress free way for her to have all the numbers and specifics available when visiting or participating in outside activities such as church, girl scouts, etc. We also trained our children to ask that correspondence be sent to both addresses so we were all current with our children’s events!
I use a card like this for each of my children, and share it with their teachers, group leaders, and sports coaches. It has kept us all “in the know” for newsletter addresses, event notification, and cancellations. Vista prints made it a $3.99 affair per child and the children love not having to explain who to contact. As the parent who has full custody of my children/stepchildren, it isn’t required to keep their natural father in the loop, but it simply works better for all of us, when we can do the simple things to keep us all on the same page in a friendly way!
