[NY] Ex wants me to provide after school care during his parenting time

TLDR: ex wants me to get the kids from school every day during his parenting time and keep them to 5pm because he overlooked the fact that our kids would have different pickup times. Shouldn’t I formally get more custody?

3 kids: oldest is at the middle school; younger two are at the elementary school. This is the first school year we have done this.

Our middle schooler plays sports now so gets picked up 1.5-2 hours later than the younger two. My ex is having a challenge with this because he lives 22 minutes away so has to drive back and forth. I live a half mile from the school and work from home. For me the only challenge is working from home after school with my 5 year old there: he just goes on screens for the hour until I’m done. My parents help after school twice a week, and I have him in after school activities twice a week which is helpful but still doesn’t stretch all the way to the end of my work day. It’s not an ideal scenario for me with work.

Ex has now asked me to get the younger two from school and keep them at my house until he picks the oldest up from sports practices during his weeks for the remainder of the school year (end of June). There is a lot more that goes into this of course: he thinks it’s unreasonable for me to expect the non custodial (I have primary physical custody), breadwinning parent to take this much time out of his work day to get the kids from school, and that it is customary for the parent who lives in the district to pick up the kids after school. The back and forth means he has to work after getting the kids dinner and it’s affecting his physical and mental health. He also notes that our parenting plan doesn’t state he needs to do this so it shouldn’t be expected. He blames this all on me. But the thing is I did suggest he arrange child care during his parenting time. On top of this, when I needed child care during the summer, because he pays for childcare, he got to choose what that childcare was.

I don’t know how to react to this in large part because there is so much blame and history wrapped up in this. Of course I would like to have the kids more: we used to have 70/30 (70 me). But I don’t think it’s fair to expect me to provide free childcare during his parenting time. My schedule also doesn’t allow it: I’ve picked up a cleaning gig on my non-parenting weeks, and also work longer hours for my regular job those days to make up for shorter hours during my parenting weeks. Further, at work my team has been incredibly gracious by scheduling out of town meetings when I don’t have my kids. If this were to occur regularly I would need to get regularly occurring child care. I feel that if he can’t handle it, then I should formally get more parenting time. If I had more parenting time I would arrange child care.

I’m not sure what to do. There is a lot in his email that needs to be addressed and we’re technically modifying our parenting agreement right now (the lawyer ghosted us so finding a new mediator), so just saying “no” doesn’t really work. I don’t want to do anything that would jeopardize the kids abilities to participate in sports (also, of course they would—both of us were 3 season athletes all the way through school) or other activities.