We had a meeting with the lady from DCS the other day. She was very nice, polite, and unassuming. We welcomed her into our home warmly and she was obviously impressed from the beginning. I know that from what she had most likely heard from BM, she was probably expecting our house to be in shambles with drugs and naked people laying on our dirty, soiled couches! Sorry, BM - you're going to have to try a *little* harder to make us look bad...lies don't really hurt us when the truth is so easy to see. And we did find out that this investigation is because of a report that BM made, not because of ours.

She asked us pertinent questions about the day-to-day activities while SS is with us, what he likes to do for fun, what types of things he talks to us about, etc. She told us that this does indeed sound like a custody battle, but more to the point it sounds like a struggle for control by BM. She said that it's obvious SS adores BF and BF adores him. We talked about pretty much everything about SS, and she kept repeating over and over that we "allow him to be the kid he needs to be" and she doesn't think he's allowed to be a kid at BM's house. She thinks BM is putting him in the middle of these grown-up problems and trying to force him to grow up too fast. She was very relieved to see that we allow him to be a kid, and try to keep him sheltered from the crap as much as we can whenever we can help it. We even talked about things that we wish we could do but won't because we're trying to protect SS from his BM...but no matter what we do, every single thing turns into a battle.

She let us know that SS was, indeed, in counseling. It didn't start until just recently, so BM was lying about how she supposedly had SS seeing a counselor several months ago. She asked us if we thought she would take SS out of counseling when the DCS investigation was closed. We told her we were absolutely 100% positive she would. She was not at all happy about that, and even offered to keep the case open longer than normal to ensure that SS got the counseling he needed and deserved.

We showed her pictures and videos of SS. She had a hard time believing that it was the same kid. She said, "The SS I met was so quiet, almost afraid," she said. She was surprised to see him on video having so much fun with us. She asked me what my first impression of SS was when I first met him many years ago. I told her that I thought he was very strong and smart, especially for the medical issues he's been through...but that I thought that his past medical problems were and are used as an excuse to hold him back and shelter him by his mother. She agreed with me 100%. We went over how SS didn't know how to brush his teeth when we first started getting him overnight, and revealed that he had never brushed them before. We told her about how we taught him how to do this and also how to wash his hair - something else he'd never done. We showed her the pictures of his head caked in dirt from where he didn't know how to wash it. We told her about the open sores on his feet that we work so hard to keep clean and hopefully heal before he goes back to his Mom's and they get worse again.

Needless to say, she was nearly speechless.

Then we let her listen to the tapes. We let her listen to SS read BF words that BM had written for him, about how he would tell the courts that BF had tried to give him beer and tell them he didn't want to visit BF ever if he sent a DCS worker to BM's house. We let her listen to SS yell at BF about how he was supposed to come to visitation if anyone associating with his mother wasn't supposed to be around me. Then we let her listen to some recordings of BM...threatening to sue BF and everyone under the sun who has ever so much as spoken to him in a legal sense, and saying that she will get the money she deserves and she doesn't care who gets hurt in the process.

She spent over 1.5 hours here, and after all of this, she was ready to go. All she could say on her way out was that she was sorry. She said she couldn't imagine ever having to go through what we go through on a daily basis. She said that after meeting us, she was very relieved that SS had somewhere he could go that was clean and the adults cared about him most. She even suggested at one point that we try to get full custody. And, she said, she'd be meeting with BM inside HER home soon. We're anxious to know how that goes.