Parenting schedule

What it's about

The parenting schedule shows transparently who lives where and when – as a coloured timeline, one card per person. It's built mainly for children commuting between two homes, but works for any set-up with several homes.

Three terms, that's all you need

patchio thinks about the rotation in three simple terms – understand these, and you understand the whole schedule:

• Home – a place where someone lives: Mum's flat, Dad's house, the flatshare. Every home has its own colour. When a person is there, they appear in that colour app-wide – in the calendar, the meal plan, the dashboard.
• Rhythm – the recurring base pattern: the normal rotation that keeps running week after week without you doing anything.
• Exception – the one-off departure: a holiday week somewhere else, a swapped weekend. It applies only for its own period and leaves the rhythm around it untouched.

Setting up the rhythm

There's a card per person. Anyone without a rhythm yet starts there with “Set up now” – missing a home? Create it right there in the editor (name + colour), nothing needs preparing in advance.

You choose the rhythm itself from ready-made patterns, rather than building individual rules:

• By the week – one week here, one week there, alternating continuously. The classic 7/7 pattern.
• Weekend pattern – weekdays at the main home, weekends at the second one. You decide whether it's every weekend or every other.
• Custom pattern – you mark the weekdays yourself on which someone is at the second home, and at what interval (every week, every two weeks …). Every other day falls back to the main home.

You also set “from when” – before that, the rhythm produces nothing, not even a calendar tile. An optional “until when” comes next: without an end the rhythm keeps running indefinitely, with an end the card shows the whole period, for example “5 Oct 2026 – 31 Dec 2026” instead of just “since 5 Oct 2026”.

Change an existing rhythm for a person who already has one and “from when” sets the cut-off: the new version applies from that day, while the time before it stays exactly as planned – including everything the calendar, meal plan and care already made of it. That is why the field shows today's date when you edit, not the old start. Set “from when” to a date before the existing rhythm and the new version replaces the old one completely – patchio says so right under the field. Tick more people and the same cut-off applies to them.

To end a rhythm, patchio asks from when: “End from this date” leaves the past untouched and closes the rhythm from the chosen day – the date therefore has to fall after the rhythm began. If everything really should go, including the weeks already past, use “Delete everything, including the past”; that cannot be undone. Exceptions stay in place either way.

The reference-week question

A rotation that repeats week after week has to start somewhere – otherwise patchio doesn't know whether this week is the “Mum week” or the “Dad week”. That's exactly what the reference week asks during setup:

• for “By the week”: whether it starts this week or next week at which home,
• for “every other weekend”: which weekend is the first one.

A small question that sets the whole schedule to the right frame.

Carrying it over to siblings

If several children commute on the same rhythm, you don't have to type it out for each one separately. During setup, tick the siblings the same rhythm should apply to – patchio sets up the same pattern for all of them. You can still adjust each child separately afterwards.

Exceptions instead of workaround acrobatics

Everyday life doesn't stick to the grid: holidays, a swapped weekend, a visit to Grandma. You enter such exceptions in the editor under Exceptions, as a plain list – from when to when, at which home, optionally with a note. During the exception's period, it wins over the rhythm; after that, everything runs normally again. The card shows you at a glance how many exceptions are on file.

Where the presence shows up

Once a rhythm is set, presence runs through the whole app – always in the colour of the relevant home:

• Calendar – coloured markers per day, showing where someone is. In tight views (month, mobile week strip) as dots, in week and agenda as name pills. Toggle “Presence on/off” to show or hide the layer. Tiles only appear within the rhythm's period – before the start, after a set end and in the gap between two rhythms the day stays empty. The same goes for the strip on the card and for the overview.
• Meal plan – the children present show up per day as coloured name pills, so you know who you're cooking for.
• Dashboard “Who's home” – shows, from your point of view, who's at your home this week, as a 7-day strip with a dot per person. Also in the home's colour.
• Care gaps – presence feeds into these too.

Important: who's allowed to look after a child, a pet or a car still depends on the assigned carers – mere presence doesn't automatically make anyone a carer.

Related topics

• Homes & addresses