The First-Week Checklist: What to Gather When Things Are Changing

Whatever this separation looks like for you, something you saw coming, something that blindsided you, something that's easy some days and unbearable on others, you can't know yet exactly how the months ahead will go. That's true whether things feel manageable right now or genuinely difficult.

What you can do, regardless of which one it is, is get the everyday information sorted while you have the headspace for it, or, if you don't have the headspace this week, whenever you next do. There's no deadline here. One thing worth doing even before the list below, though: write down the actual date, the day you both agreed things were over, even if you're still under the same roof for now. It sounds like a strange thing to prioritise, but agencies, schools, and lawyers will ask for it later, and it's a surprisingly easy detail to lose track of once a few months have passed and everyone remembers it slightly differently.

This isn't a legal checklist, and it isn't about preparing for a fight. It's a practical list of the everyday information that tends to be genuinely useful to have gathered in one place, mostly because it's easier to find ten minutes for this now than to go searching for it later, at a moment you need it quickly and can least afford the scramble.

If a lawyer or mediator is involved in your situation, they may ask for specific documents beyond this list, this is a sensible starting point, not a substitute for their advice.

Identity and core documents

The basics that tend to come up more often than you'd expect, school enrolments, medical appointments, travel, official forms.

• Birth certificates for each child

• Passports, if they have one

• Your own ID and, if relevant, your children's other parent's contact and ID details

• Any existing parenting agreement or court order, if one exists

Once you've actually located these, the harder part is keeping them somewhere you won't lose track of again, especially if you're now managing two addresses instead of one. A scanned copy saved somewhere secure, in My Corner's Documents, for instance, means you're not digging through a filing box at 7am because a school trip form is due and the passport's needed for ID.

School and childcare

Details that are easy to assume you'll remember, and surprisingly easy to lose track of when routines shift.

• School or daycare name, address, and main contact

• Your children's teacher or key contact's name

• Login details for any school portal or communication app

• Term dates and any upcoming school events already on the calendar

This is also a good moment to think about who's actually on the contact list at school, not just for pickup authorisation, but for who gets called first if something happens during the day. If that needs to change, most schools have a simple form for it, better to sort now than mid-crisis later.

Medical information

Not urgent, but genuinely useful to have in one place rather than scattered across old texts and emails.

• GP and any specialist contact details

• Known allergies, conditions, or regular medications

• Immunisation records, if you have easy access to them

• Health insurance details, if applicable

Financial basics

This is about clarity, not conflict, knowing where things stand makes ordinary conversations easier, and protects you either way this goes.

• A rough sense of shared or child-related regular expenses (school fees, activities, childcare)

• Any existing agreement about who pays for what, even an informal one

• Bank details relevant to shared costs, if applicable

This is exactly the kind of thing that gets fuzzy fast without a record. "I think I paid for that" isn't the same as knowing you did, or knowing the other parent still owes you for it. A simple running log, what was paid, by whom, for what, is one of the lowest-effort habits that saves the most future arguments. My Corner's Expenses tracker exists for precisely this, log it once when it happens, and you're never trying to reconstruct three months of costs from memory later.

Contacts worth having in one place

• Both parents' current contact details

• Any other adults regularly involved in the children's care, grandparents, regular babysitters, etc.

• Your own support contacts, a friend, family member, or professional you'd want to reach easily

The thing everyone forgets: pets

If you have a pet, and especially if the kids are attached to it, it's worth having this conversation early rather than letting it become an afterthought that turns into a fight later. Where the pet's living, who's covering vet bills, whether it moves between households the same way the kids do, none of this is trivial if your children are attached to that dog or cat too. It's easy to assume this will just sort itself out. It's also one of the most common things separation advice sources flag as a genuine, avoidable source of conflict, precisely because nobody thought to raise it until there was already tension over it.

A note on pace

None of this needs to happen today, or this week. If it's easier to do one section now and the rest another time, that's completely fine, the goal is simply to have reduced how many places this information lives, not to finish a project or prove you're handling things well.

You don't know yet how this next stretch is going to go, and that's exactly why it's worth having this together, not because you're expecting the worst, but because whichever way it goes, you'll already have what you need instead of trying to find it under pressure.

If typing all of this into yet another app feels like one more thing on the pile, that's fair. My Corner is built so you can add things as you go, a document today, a contact tomorrow, rather than needing to sit down and do it all in one sitting. [Get started →]