Hi everyone!! Wow – It has been a long time since I’ve posted here, and I see a lot of new "faces" I’ve been so busy at both work and at home, it's almost impossible for me to even post much less read everyone else's stuff....so I apologize that lately I only come for advice and don't offer any.

The last time I wrote on here, we had been speaking to a lawyer about filing for full custody of SS4. The lawyer thinks we have a good case. But she was rather honest with us that she sees a lot of cases where it purely depends on the judge that day which way it could go. After talking to my CPS friend, she told me some horror stories and explained that in most cases, the mother has to be absolutely negligent, abusing drugs, or worse, for a child’s father to be granted full custody. And we believe BM won’t go down without a fight on this one. Also, our lawyer was rather honest with us that A) there is a $5K retainer fee and we’ll blow through that right away. She said this could cost us around $20k or higher….we absolutely have no way to pay for that. So basically, actually going through with it is hardly an option.

In the meantime, we’ve also been considering refinancing our house. We want to take BM’s name off of it as well as lower our monthly payments. We found out this is all feasible, the only part that sucks is when you refinance, your house has to be in sellable condition...and well..some of our house projects are unfinished, and we were hoping to use the money we will save every month to get those done. Now we have to get those done PLUS get some of our credit card debt down before we can even think about refinancing. On the plus side, BM was completely agreeable about this and will sign a quit claim and everything she needs to do – apparently she is unable to buy a new car recently because her debt-income ratio is too high with the house loan still being on her name even if she’s not making payments. So she was very happy with the idea of getting her name off of it.

So here is our current predicament: We are considering asking BM to sit down with us (either in private or with a mediator). We want to ask her to split EVERYTHING 50/50 with us. This would mean we would continue with EOW schedule we’ve been doing since last July, and we’d continue on with our schedule of taking her daughter (my DH’s former stepdaughter) 4 nights EOW. We would not pay her child support, we would only pay her half of her monthly cost to carry him on her insurance policy (which would be around $30). We would pay daycare on our weeks, she would pay on hers. We’d split every expense. (This would save us approximately $200 a month).

We would also point out to her that with our current financial situation, we are unable to refinance the house so it will remain in her name until we can sell it, which will be up to 5 years or more. She basically can’t apply for anything involving credit until then.

Worst case scenario: BM says “HELL NO!” If that happens, we will hand her a piece of paper with all of the expenses of caring for her daughter for the last 3 years who is not even DH’s child, and request some form of payment for that. We may also show her the stack of papers we have in documentation and explain to her that we do have a lawyer who is telling us we have a good case to file for FULL custody. Maybe it’s a dirty way to play this game, but it might be enough to get her to agree. And if it just pisses her off, then so be it. We’ll lay low for awhile and let her cool down. If she asks where we’d get the money to take her to court for full custody, we’d half-lie and tell her that we don’t want to have to fight with her but if we have to, we will, and that we have family who will help if we HAVE to.

BEST case scenario: BM agrees to split everything. We save some money every month, and everything is rightfully 50/50.
Now I have a few questions for anyone out there to answer!

In the best case scenario, I know that we still have to go back to a lawyer to draw up a new stipulation and sign it and submit to child support enforcement agency. Can we all go through the same lawyer to make it quick? Or can we draw up our own papers and get them authorized by the court somehow? How does that all work when you at one time agreed on one way and now we are changing it? Has anyone done this? How much can we expect this all to cost us?