The Crazy "System"

We had our heart-to-heart with the caseworker on Monday. It really annoyed me because at one point she said "when you adopt the boys". I said, "if we adopt the boys".

She was trying to get us to go back to the crazy system we had with coordinating visits with the boys great-grandmother. This nearly put us both in the nut house when we did this originally. We also were very close to asking for the boys to be moved because of all we were going through with the bio family breathing down our throats.

C1's "beahviors" also flare up after visits with extended family, being at their worst when he sees great-grandmother. He also used to fake illnesses. Every Saturday when she'd take them which was going to be for 4 hours, she called 2 hours later to say C1 was crying about an ear infection. Once he was home, suddenly he was fine and not even mentioning his ears. And we'd say come at 9 and she'd come at 9:40 or whenever she got around to picking them up. That's not how this works, lady.

Needless to say, we said NO. The caseworker seemed to go along but then we got some "you should do it" from the therapist. And she only wants us to do it because it will make us look better as an adoptive family, that judges like to see contact with the bio family. F*ck that.

We're pretty much not willing to adopt them if we have to keep bio family contact or lie and say we will. At this time, we definitely don't think it's in the boys' best interest and definitely not in ours. These kids also have an extremely large extended family that wants to see them at their convenience. If we let the great-grandmother see them, the other great-grandmother will want to see them, along with the grandfather, grandmother, and aunts and uncles.

For a moment, we considered her seeing C2. Since C2 had lived with her for about a year, C1 only a couple of months, and she clearly only wants to see C2. In fact, once on the phone she told me, "C2 is the one I really miss". C2 is the least f*ct up out of this situation so why do things that may potentially f*ck him up??? His biggest problem is transitions: visits, school, therapy...so we decided against this.

The only good thing that came out of our meeting was venting about the schedule. Since they are officiall pursuing termination of parental rights, they cut their mom's visits from 8 hours to 5 hours but still spread them out over 2 days. Hello!?! That makes no difference to us or the boys. We asked for them to be cut down to 1 day/week since we are overwhelmed with their schedule. 2 visits, 2 therapies, dr's apptmts, court, and team meetings. Plus, their trying to convince us
to re-add the great-grandmother's visits. AAAAH!!! BUT we are relieved to have only one bio mom visit now and it will only be 4 hours and they're at a much better organized location. I think this is also better for the boys since after termination they'll have no visits, so it went from 2 to 1 and then zero instead of 2 to zero.

Oh well, off to think about something else.