She has agreed to an extra weekend and an extra mid week overnight in make up time. However, what she has not agreed to and what we are currently in a stalemate on is my request to tack the additional midweek onto the next weekend. My issue is that I have a specific arrangement with my employer to work from home on the court ordered days that allow me to pick up the children from school and daycare at a reasonable hour. What my ex is insisting is that I not be allowed to add that additional day to my weekend. I don't have the employment flexibility to get additional work-from-home days when I want them, and even though it wasn't my fault, I've already used up a bit of goodwill there by having to isolate at home for a whole week. Now they want me back in the office as much as possible to make up for it.
Currently I have Friday 3:30pm to Sunday 5:30pm with the children on every second weekend. She has never agreed to me having a 'full' weekend despite the children being 6 and nearly 4. So, even in exceptional circumstances where she has decided to withhold the children, she won't allow them to spend a full weekend with me. Her argument, when I first proposed it, was that my daughter has a dance class on Monday that she takes her to and therefore it would not suit. I then reasonably suggested that I would be happy for her to pick up our daughter from child care to take her to her class and that effectively all it would do is allow me to have the children stay Sunday night and I would take them to child care and school on Monday morning, and although my time would 'technically' end at 3:30pm, if she had any commitments with the children, I would be happy to let her continue those and that I didn't understand what was wrong with that arrangement.
She then changed her argument to words to the effect of "I don't agree to you having the extra night on the weekend and I don't have to justify my decisions to you, make up time is a gesture of goodwill". Despite the fact that she withheld the children when she clearly didn't need to, so I don't really consider it a gesture of goodwill at all, I call the minimum she should offer to mitigate the damage caused by her decision to withhold unreasonably.
Anyway, funnily enough, it may just come down to this: If she can withhold the children, so can I. I'll already have them for that weekend so what is she going to do if I don't hand them over on Sunday afternoon? What if I keep them until Monday? What's she going to do? Is a judge going to care more about me withholding for a bit less than 24 hours to claw back make up time that morally speaking should have been provided to me/the children, than they would about her withholding the children from me during two different blocks of time for 3 overnights, all of this AFTER their Covid isolation period ended? My gut feeling is that the answer is no. The judge may chastise us and call us both 'pork chops' for playing silly games with the children. But ultimately I think I'd have a pretty fair argument for why I withheld. "I was only trying to give my children have quality time with me in keeping with my my fortnightly time as per the orders, and that their mother was dictating that I could only have the time if it was on her terms. I tried to be reasonable and flexible, your honour, and tried to find a compromise with her including allowing her to keep her existing commitments on the Monday, but she refused to even discuss it further."