Please Help Ares and Adonis

Dear friends,

We want you to meet our nephews, Ares and Adonis, ages 3 and 2 respectively. (The photos shared are of the boys in there new environment in Minnesota)

Our nephews are sweet and kind-hearted and they love each other very much. This is all very heartbreaking and stressful to all of us, we don't want them to end up with strangers. We need help.

The full story and all the stress we've had to deal with is below but the bottom line is that it's important that the boys stay in a stable environment with people they love and that love them while things with their parents get sorted.

North Dakota CPS took the boys, promised to help, and are now saying it's a family arrangement. We don't want them to end up back in CPS foster care and need help that North Daktoa is now refusing to give.

On October 22nd, the boys were taken by CPS from their home in Bismarck, ND. CPS contacted their paternal grandmother (Randi) in Minnesota and CPS handed them over.

We were all under the impression that CPS would provide some assistance with daycare and other necessarities to help this kind grandmother (Randi) with these two little boys but so far, it has been nothing but fighting them as they backtrack.

The current status is that North Dakota CPS is calling this a family arrangement rather than a foster placement. They are saying there wasn't a court order. Because of these things, their grandmother and closest available family is struggling to work full time, maintain her financial situation, and she has two other children in the house that need attention and care as well.

As a family, we have tried to figure out next steps, how to afford daycare (which is upwards of $2000 a month), food, clothes and such without the help of CPS. Seemingly non-foster related help is not available either and Minnesota has their hands tied due to North Dakota CPS being of no help, backtracking, and overall only caring about their status and covering their inconsistencies.

While we are all sending what we can, this is not sustainable and while North Dakota figures it out and we try to navigate systems we are not familar with for help that may never be available, we need help to get through the next couple of months.

Besides this, we also (for obvious reasons) do not trust North Dakota's Child Protective Services and I wouldn't trust them to properly protect them or place them. They will most definitely be separated into different homes or even a group home as there is a lack of available foster parents in the state right now.

With heavy hearts,

Rita, Felicia, and Randi