hi, it's been a while since i've been on here, since amazingly things have been going pretty smoothly for awhile with our blended family situation. but today an issue arose which has got me depressed, frustrated, and at a loss for how to handle it. i'm hoping someone here will be able to help me decide what is the best way.

my dh has EOW visitation and when the custody agreement was decided upon, bm asked for the provision for the 4 weeks of summer visits, which would have been split into two 2 week periods, to be excluded because she "just couldn't stand to have SD7 away from her for that long." my dh was representing himself as he couldn't afford an attorney at the time and he for one, wasn't sure how to fight anything like that and for two, just wanted the divorce finalized that day instead of dragging it out any longer because it had already been over a year since the time they had split up. so he didn't argue and the summer visitation was excluded. at this time SD was 5 years old.

since then BM took my dh back to court attempting to get his visitation suspended and eventually to have his visitations supervised due to some idiodic accusations of drug use. that case was again dragged out for 6 months of him not seeing his daughter, missing out on his 8 days of visitation for christmas and not even getting to see her for christmas at all for that matter. he finally got back into court for the hearing after all the continuences, took his drug test and passed and got her accusations thrown out.

once his visitation was restored, the paperwork said he could have visitation according to "option so-and-so" which by a technicality DID include the summer visitation. it was not excluded in this second court order the way it was in the original one. dh's lawyer was the one that informed us of this fact when we called him to figure out what we would need to do to allow dh his summer visitation. so we let bm know of this new development, and she of course argued, called her lawyer and said he had told her otherwise and that everything was just the same as it had been originally. that was not the case of course, but our lawyer told us the only thing we could do would be to bring a case against her for contempt for not allowing his visitation. we have not had the money to do so thus far.

but, we have been able to do enough butt-kissing with bm to get her to agree to SOME of the summer time on HER terms without taking it to court. i believe she knows deep down that EVENTUALLY we will have the money to take it to court and get it in writing and have it on OUR terms, because there is no valid reason a judge wouldn't allow the four weeks the option of his visitations allows for. so she wants to play nice so we will feel lucky we get the ONE week at a time she is willing to give us without spending the money to fight it out in court. we will take what we can get because right now we still don't have the money to fight her. so she agreed to one week at a time and we just recently got the first week. it went okay but the weather was horrible..it rained literally EVERY DAY we had SD. we weren't able to come through on any of our promises to take her swimming, camping, etc. we did go out to dinner, family's houses for a couple get-togethers, a cookout (there was one dry hour where dh's mom grilled him some steaks for father's day)...stuff like that, but other than that we were all house-bound pretty much the entire week. admittedly, it wasn't the exciting and fun week we had planned for. we tried to make it fun for SD, but we could see she was bored.

so, SD goes home and we ask BM about another week we would be able to have SD for and possibly this time go on vacation together. BM ignores me for about 4 days and finally i tell her that i need to put in my schedule request for work so i really need to have an idea of what week we could have SD. she finally answers me telling me SD asked her to tell my DH and i that a week was just too long to stay with us and she didn't want to come back for another one. she had been homesick but just hadn't wanted to hurt our feelings by telling us.

this is very confusing because during the week she was with us SD acted kind of bored and stir-crazy, yes, but she was also telling us that she didn't want to go home, that she was going to BEG her mom to let her come back for another week as soon as she got home, that she wanted us to take her camping next time, etc. she didn't act at all homesick. she did ask to call her mom around the 3rd day, saying her mom had asked her to call during the week. but after that she didn't mention wanting to call her mom again for the next 4 days. nothing like that. i just don't get it???

when bm told me all this i told her i suspected SD was feeling this way because she had been bored and it wasn't the week she had expected to have, and asked her to talk to SD and find out whether she would want to stay for a week if we got to do more fun things like maybe go on vacation. BM said SD told her she did have fun with us but she just didn't want to be away from home that long. we honestly didn't see ANY of these feelings coming from her while she was with us. like i said, she did seem BORED, but not SAD? no tears or saying she wanted to go home or anything of the like. i just really don't know what to think of it all.

and if she truly doesn't want to be with us for any extended period of time, why have dh and i been fighting SO HARD for it all this time? should we continue fighting for more time with a kid that doesn't want to be with us? we don't want to FORCE her to stay with us...but we do love her a lot and want to spend all the time we can with her. i just don't know if we should stop trying at this point. or how to handle the situation at all. if anyone has any advice it will be greatly appreciated.