Love & stability for Beau & Dalton

Six months ago, our lives changed in the most powerfully unexpected way. We were called by my wife’s cousin who asked us to pick her two small boys up because she could not handle them anymore. Upon arriving, we found the boys in horrific conditions. Both parents were, and very well possibly still are, meth addicts. The boys, Beau and Dalton, were both filthy, running around in only diapers, were only fed milk from a shared moldy bottle, were forced to live in the back room of the father’s garage where they were kept locked away and hidden, and were basically raising themselves. Within the first month of us having the boys, both parents failed a drug test. The father then fell out of the equation and the mother did everything in her power to keep us from helping her children. She refused to give us their background information, their medical information, to show up for her visitations, got into trouble multiple times with cps for not completing her required programs, and never even tried to find a job to help support her children. We tried everything we could to get her to visit with them, to help her, to work with cps to see what we could do in order to remedy the situation. Both boys were mentally and emotionally distraught. They would bite themselves and each other, rip out their hair, scream until they made themselves sick, and to this day have multiple night terrors throughout the night. With a lot of hard work, love, and support from our families, we have managed to break these horrible habits. The boys are healthier than they have ever been, no longer attempt to self-harm or harm each other, are able to handle their emotions as two and three year olds should, and know that they are taken care of and loved. However, on February 7, 2018, the courts decided that it was time to reunite the mother with her children. They were going to give them a two week test period and by the end of the second week, the boys would be back in her home. At that time, the mother still did not have a job, a steady living situation, had never been to any of the boys doctors appointments and could barely manage to make it to her weekly visitations. We were concerned that when the boys returned, everything that we had accomplished with them and for them would immediately stop and everything would go back as it was. So, we invited the mother to come live with us so that the boys could finish their therapies, could stay in the daycare they had become accustomed to, could continue to see the doctors we had found for them because of how malnourished they were, and so that the mother could learn how to handle them by herself. Since day one, she still has not found a job, she will not wake up to get the boys ready for school, closes her bedroom door on them in the middle of the night when they are having a night terror, cannot and will not feed them, still does not go to their doctors appointments, and solely relies on us to raise her children while she maintains her status as their legal mother. She had only been here for two weeks before she disappeared for six days with no word of where she was or if she would be returning. Already the boys have begun to revert back to their violent and emotionally distressed states and she looks to us to fix it because she does not want to. She nearly decided to walk out on them again when asked to make them dinner. It is a sad and frustrating situation. Therefore, we have decided to begin the process of trying to legally adopt the children to protect them from the life they previously lived. We have tried and tried to show her how to parent and how to care for her children but she simply refuses to do it. In our hearts, we know that if these boys are allowed to return home with her, wherever that may be as she literally has nowhere else to go, they will be right back in the same situation as they were in before. We are doing everything in our power to prevent that. The first thing we must do is to obtain an attorney, who we have already found and consulted with. That is why we are asking for your help. We save every dime we can and are on our way to saving enough for the initial retainer but this type of adoption is very difficult and very expensive. Please help us save these boys from a life of neglect and abuse.