Catch up

Wow, did we have a great week in San Diego! We got to spend lovely time with our Dearhearts, got to meet their newest daughter, provide distraction when Mrs. Dearheart had to return to work, visited the ocean one afternoon, and squeezed in a trip to Disneyland, too. It was a very nice distraction.

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Until I got the email from the grandma expressing her "very upset" feelings at me. In the past, I'd asked her to share her social workers' names with me. She said she wasn't comfortable with that at that point. Ok, I'm good with that. I also told her that we feared, should he/they need an out-of-family placement, they could end up in the System and then we'd lose them, so I was going to find out what we needed to do to not let that happen. So, we got the foster care paperwork rolling.

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The hitch was how to reply and be conciliatory while still standing firm in the decisions we've made.

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Oh Grandma, I'm so sorry for such a big misunderstanding. No, we are not trying to "swoop and snatch" and I did contact CPS, but certainly not to "inquire" about the case. I have respected your wish for privacy. I hope I also made it clear to you, though, that we were going to do what we had to do to let CPS know that we were interested in adopting him/them IF Peggy's rights were terminated and IF you opted not to parent. I think I've explained our fear that he/they could be thrown into the System and we'd never have the opportunity to bring him/them home, if that was what was needed.

I called the general CPS number and was passed to FosterCareWorker; whether or not she is working with you, I don't know nor did she indicate either way. I gave a general explanation of the situation--asking no questions about the case, only what
we should do if an out-of-family placement became necessary. I did not use
your names and, as far as I knew, she didn't know of the case. She said that to present anyone's name to the court, they need to be licensed foster parents because IF parental rights are terminated and IF "the grandma" chooses not parent, he/they will be placed immediately with other foster parents from the pool and it would be very, very difficult--if not impossible--to move him/them here at a later point. I don't know why she would have said that I was inquiring about the situation because that is absolutely not the case.

I am doing my best to respect your privacy as much as possible. I'm not going to the public hearings. I'm not questioning friends who work in the court system. I'm not emailing you everyday. I do understand that this is difficult for your family, but please understand that this is difficult for my family, too. We have never stopped loving AJ, we have never stopped considering him the missing part of our family--as BabyGirl said, "since he left, there's been a hole in our hearts." When you told me that Peggy had been beating him to the point of potential brain damage, neural hematomas, and multiple broken bones, it was nearly as painful as when the judge initially found Peggy to not be an "imminent threat" and ordered him returned. No, my family may not be facing potential jail time, but we have our own kind of hell over all this, too.

I am on your side on this, whether or not it feels like it right now. I absolutely defer to you when it comes to this situation, something I've tried to make clear to our CPS contact. But I was also not going to miss the opportunity to potentially bring our little boy home simply because I didn't make a phone call to ask for some general information. Again, I am sorry for the misunderstanding.

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I haven't heard anything back from her yet.

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And then there's the matter of Peggy's most recent court date, the pretrial hearing in criminal court on February 24. Much to my surprise, Peggy opted not to admit and plead guilty to the charges, she's opted to have a jury trial. Apparently, she thinks she can beat the charges (awful pun intended). I have not heard if that trial has a start-date yet; nonetheless, she has a return to juvenile court to divulge AJ's real father's name or provide a list of potential fathers on March 27.

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In the meantime, reference requests have gone out (thank you!) and we've begun our largest mountain of paperwork. We're going to schedule our classes for May--the next available dates.

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This may all be for naught, but, again, we'll know that we've done what we can for our little guy.