Can kids choose who to live with? If so...when? Also custody battle advice wanted :-)
I was just thinking... right now my SD is only 3 (almost 4), and her speech is pretty unintelligible... so this wouldn't even apply to her for now. But... when kids are a little older and can express their preferences more, do they have any legal say in which parent they want to live with? If my SD, in the future, keeps asking us to live with us, will the courts take that into account in a custody hearing? At what age do courts start caring about what the CHILD wants? I know she would choose to live with us if she could.
Cuz i know in 18 months or so we are going to try to get custody (right now there is no arrangement, BM is considered the custodial parent, but we have no legal visitations set up yet and are trying to avoid it becuase we get her more often this way)
Thanks for the responses in advance!!
-Loving Future Step Mother 
Also, in the meantime... is there anything my fiance and I could be doing the next year or so to prepare for a custody battle? BM has no clue that we are planning this...but esp. if i have to move out of state for work, we want her with us. When her and my fiance first broke up, and SD was a lil less than 2 yrs old, she went and lived with him and his mother out of state for 6 months or so and she didn't care... she likes when we take her, and doesn't even call when she visits her grandmother for weeks at a time to check up on her... do any of these things matter in court? I need some "ammunition" if you will that we can start building a strong case to become the primary parents eventually.
Each state varies on the age
Each state varies on the age that a child can go in front of a judge and say who she would prefer to live with. Usually it is 12, but your situation sounds like it would be an exception due to BM basically not caring. But that doesn't mean the judge will award custody to the parent the child prefers to be with.
For your "ammunition".....keep track of everything, like how often you have her, things BM does or doesn't do for her...things like that. Before we got custody of SD15, I had a separate calendar that I kept track of all the times we had SD and I also had a journal that I wrote everything in that SD said to us and different things BM did or didn't do. DH & I do have custody of SD15 now, but due to other circumstances. But keep track of everything.
Hope that helps ya.
Talk to an attorney, and
Talk to an attorney, and make sure it's someone who specializes in family law and knows what they're talking about. Document, document, document... keep record of how often the child stays in your home, how often her mother leaves her with other people, any arguments your DH has with her, etc. Leave your emotions at the door, make sure that you are only including the facts.
You would have to prove this woman unfit, especially to take a young child out of state with you. That's a long shot.
Your fiance should have taken her to court when she left the child with him for 6 months... why didn't he? Since he let her back into her life he can't back peddle and use that against her now. My SO did the exact same thing.
If you are going to go after
If you are going to go after custody, you should just file now. File before BM. Get a lawyer and document everything. I mean everything. From the time you picked SD up to the time you had her, when BM calls, when you call BM, write if you call and BM doesn't answer, any issues, ect. DOCUMENT EVERYTHING. At SD's age, you are going to have to prove BM unfit, and as said above, just because BM didn't call or SD goes to grandma's isn't going to do it. You have to have proof, they aren't going to go off of hearsay.
Also, even if there is an age set where they will take the child's opinion in to account, they usually don't.
"If I turn into another, Dig me up from under what is covering the better part of me" -Incubus