It's been a long long time since I updated and my husband finally went through a lawyer to get things changed so thought I'd update what has been going on. 

We are currently waiting to get court docs signed off by a judge for a default judgement that would mean sd12 would live with us during the school year and visit her mother during the vacations and would give my husband full legal custody. BM was served more than 30 days ago and so far has not responded to the court, so unless she does something in the next few days or the judge disagrees this should hopefully all go through. When she was served my husband of course recived the obligatory phone call telling him he was aweful, begging him to not do it and telling him that her lawyer was going to make sure he didn't win. Radio silence since. No lawyer has been registered to her for this case with the court and she hasn't even called sd.

SD thinks that she is going back to her mother's house for the start of the school year (she was with us for the summer), though my husband did explain to her a few weeks ago that he was asking a court for her to stay with us. We haven't mentioned it to her since. BM hasn't called SD in the last month, though they may have been texting - we are unsure. 

Earlier in the year she had her other child taken away from her and placed with her own brother and his wife as foster parents because she was not handling his diabetes well and the authorities thought that his life was at risk. He is a toddler, so I understand that it must be tricky to deal with at that age, but when the stakes are so high she needed to step up and get on top of things. She had a big altercation with the social worker when they took her son and the cops were called. The social worker spoke to my husband and said she would be happy to recomend to a court that SD live with us. They boy has no contact with his bio father as far as I can tell and BM broke up with her ex who was helping to raise him a month or so before this happened. Hense why the boy is in family foser care. 

Just after this happened BM left SD with my MIL and disapeared for a week or so without really any communication as to what was happening. She got back in touch after that week and collected SD and my husband had not heard anything from her since then. He started looking for a lawyer to get sd to live with him, he hoped to have it sorted quickly  but it took months to get to where we are now thanks to slow courts, covid and BM avoiding being served.  

According to SD all her mother does now is work her job and work to try to get her son back. But the reports we are hearing from my husbands ex-BIL is that BM hasn't even had any visitations with her son yet after 6 month or so. Seems that BM is all talk when it comes to taking action for her kids these days. 

So we are waiting on to the paper work to go through before we inform SD (my husband doesn't want her to remind BM in case she does file something with the court and delay things). Once that is done we can sign SD up for school, and keep our fingers crossed that BM doesn't drive across multiple states and turn up on our doorstep trying to take sd away.