Warring vacations and visitations, bored teenagers. . . . What’s a parent to do? Plan, plan, and plan, say the successful, and you’ll bring that beast to heel.

by Mary K. Zajac

My friend Ann in Philadelphia was relishing a weekend alone with the baby as we chatted about vacation plans. But the days ahead were as much as she could handle. “As of Monday night, we have the baby plus two [children]; the following Sunday, we have the baby plus four. That’s hard enough to keep track of, let alone summer plans!”

Perspective is everything. As a child, you anxiously await the last day of school and the promise of wide-open days filled with sleeping and swimming, biking, and unending video games. As a parent, the promise of children’s idle (read lazy) days becomes time to fill with meaningful activities, camps and classes, and supervised instruction.

As a stepparent, things get even more complicated. Your spouse’s daughter wants to spend the summer scrapbooking. Your son has swim team practice, and your ex’s new spouse has an elaborate European vacation planned. And that’s not even considering the teenagers who basically want to do absolutely nothing.

How do you even begin to manage the chaos that is your kids’ summer vacation?

“Refrigerator magnets, color-coded calendars, and highlighters,” jokes Ann, when she focuses seriously on my planning questions. For someone who juggles the schedules of five kids (two hers, two his, one theirs), I think she’s pretty cheerful when she adds, “Then there’s everything that you let slide.”

Other moms of blended families agree that organization is essential. “The key to planning the summer is just that – planning the summer,” says Valerie Walker, a remarried mother of one and stepmother of two. She’s also a professional organizer and president of her own company, Destination Organized.

Walker begins ordering her family’s summer in March, poring over camp descriptions that come out in early spring, mapping out custody schedules, checking with her ex-husband’s wife and her husband’s ex-wife to see when they want to schedule vacations. She enters every bit of information into an electronic calendar spreadsheet. Once everyone has made their plans, she, as she describes it, “maps it all out like a report” and sends it to both parents. Even throughout the year, she fields phone calls from the other parents asking for reminders of what’s happening when. Despite the amount of work involved, Walker is happy to be the organizer.

“It helps to know who’s doing what,” she explains. “We can’t wing it when there’s this much going on. It’s a lot of kids, a lot of responsibilities. Our regimen doesn’t change unless we plan it.”

My friend Ann’s philosophy of scheduling is much the same: Schedule early and stick to it, even if that means not being able to take advantage of every opportunity. Usually, the pluses outweigh the minuses.

“We don’t go away too much,” she says of herself and her husband. “But every couple of years, my husband’s mom likes to take the extended family on vacation. A couple years ago, she took the family to Mexico, but the kids’ weeks were already planned. I had to say, ‘Sorry.’ ”

“This year, we were mapping out the summer,” she continues, “and I told her, ‘If you’re planning to do a family vacation this year, here’s the week we can do it.’ And she booked it right away.”

Claudette Chêvenert has seen lots of blended families in her practice as a life coach. But she’s also seen summertime issues crop up in her own family.

Her son and stepdaughters are now grown, but she remembers the time when her son traveled to his father’s farm in Canada for the summer. “When I called,” she remembers, “[my son] would start crying. He wanted to come home, and my ex-husband got upset. Before I called, my son didn’t have issues.”

Similarly, when Chênevert and her husband took the newly blended family to Disney World, her stepdaughters wanted to call their mother every day. “It became disruptive,” she says. “We were trying to create new shared experience and bond with them.” But when the girls called home, “they got homesick and began crying. Then I felt very incompetent because I felt I couldn’t do anything about it. I couldn’t comfort them. They wanted their mom.”

Looking back, Chênevert says she wishes she would have set ground rules before they left for vacation, allowing the girls to call home a given number of times, but not every day.

Homesickness is just one aspect of the stress that comes with summer vacations. Communication and negotiation – with the other parent and with the child – are key, says Chênevert, who experienced much of that firsthand. She urges blended families to plan summers together. Having a round-robin-type meeting where “everybody has a say in what they would like to see in a vacation…makes everybody feel they have a part,” explains Chênevert.

“Sometimes visiting children feel they’re not part of a family,” she adds, “especially if they’re not part of decision making. I think it’s a wise thing for parents to sit together, plan together as a family, and negotiate. It’s teaching children negotiation skills.”

Stepmom Paula Bisacre, and reMarriage’s founder, takes this strategy one step further. Negotiation and discussion are fine, she says, but “sometimes you have to be strong about creating time to bond. Even if no one would choose it, a family vacation is critical when you’re getting to know each other. You might have to put your foot down for the good of all.”

But even careful planning can’t account for variables that make up summer. What if one parent can afford a more extravagant vacation and the other, only something modest? What if parents have different ideas on how summers should be spent?

Returning home from a vacation can also create stress in families, especially when their economic status differs. We’re comfortable, says Ann, “but my ex and his wife do quite well financially. So our situation pretty much runs the full gamut of household incomes and vacation/camp arrangements.” The vacations Ann’s husband’s children have with their mom are often limited to trips to the local bowling alley or park, while Ann’s ex and his wife have the means to take Ann’s children to Cape Cod or Florida.

About her children’s different experiences, Ann says this: “I think for the most part they understand that different families do things differently.” Still, she’s relieved when the visitation schedule staggers the kids’ returns home from their vacations with their parents.

Even though parents in blended families realize they can’t control what their children do on vacation with another parent, it can still be frustrating when parents have to negotiate how children will spend the rest of their time. When Ann’s son qualified for a special summer reading program, she “couldn’t wait to sign him up.” But her ex-husband said, “That’s not what summer’s for. Summer’s for fun.”

“I decided, ‘I’m not going to fight this battle,’ ” says Ann. Others might negotiate a balance between something frivolous and life affirming: If she attends Spanish class this summer, then she can go to that video game convention with you.

Walker experienced just the opposite when her husband’s ex-wife hadn’t come up with a plan for the children while she worked during the summer. In what’s become an unspoken agreement, Walker signs all three children up for summer camp, calculates the cost, and submits receipts and a schedule to the children’s mother. No one complains and the children have adequate activities to keep them busy and away from the television.

But what’s most important, most moms say, is putting the kids first. Kathryn M. separated from her husband when her youngest daughters were 9 and 12. After eight years of separation, the couple eventually reconciled, but during their time apart, says Kathryn, “We made the decision that the girls’ lives should be as normal as possible.”

“My husband and I had to keep an open relationship even though I wanted to kill him. We weren’t going to have family holidays or family vacations taken away from [the girls],” she says, “We wanted it to be life as usual.”

Like many children of divorced parents, the girls ended up taking separate vacations with both their mother and their father, but at that age, fitting in two vacations was easy. What was more important than any vacation, though, says Kathryn, was that the girls knew “there was always so much love for them on both sides.”

Mary K. Zajac is a freelance writer living in Baltimore, Maryland.