Quote Quoting birdbrain53
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HI

The first thing you need to do is write a Responsive Declaration. You can get the forms for that at your courthouse.

Then after you have written it, you need to file it by a certain date that your court has set, and serve it on the other party's lawyer.

Your Responsive Declaration should set out the facts:

1. You were never married to the child's father. You are by default the custodial parent and request the court to make an order that the default custody arrangement be made permanent.

2. The child's father has or has not paid child support. If not, ask for guideline child support, health insurance coverage & 1/2 out of pocket medical expenses (co-pay, prescriptions for example), and 1/2 child care costs. [These are reasonable requests].

3. The child has severe and life threatening medical conditions which require careful supervision. The father has not been involved in the child's life since August 2006 and has no knowledge of the condition nor how to deal with it.

4. Attach a proposed parenting timeshare agreement (father has supervised visitation until he shows that he can handle the medical issues; unsupervised Saturdays until child is comfortable with visiting father; then every other weekend with father). If father has any drug/alcohol issues the supervised visitation should be overseen by a professional with father paying the fee. State reasonable times for the visitation time such as Saturday morning at 9 AM until Sat evening at 7:30 PM. This cuts down on people being late for pickup or in returning children.

5. Travel expenses should be shared 50/50. He picks up at the beginning of the visitation period, you pick up at the end.

6. Child cannot be transferred across state lines. Whichever parent has custody must give an itinerary and contact info should they take the child out of the residential city of the parent (like vacation, day trip to grandparents, etc)

There's probably other things that would be helpful to have in a parenting agreement, but these are a good start.

HTH

Bird Brain
Thank You, Thank You, Thank You! Thats exactly what I needed! I was just baffled when the lawyer wouldn't even give me a hint on what to do next (but I guess thats his job, to get hired! He said him telling me how to do it is like a doctor telling you how to diagnose/treat yourself...). I'm such a reasonable person and have been since day one so this all is crazy to me... he'd already have unsupervised visits/overnights and wouldn't be spending all this money and causing all this stress if he wouldn't have disappeared from our lives. And thank you for the tip of transporting the child across state lines, as he's prone to just leaving randomly spur of the moment and driving to NY (we live in NC) and it didn't even cross my mind at first.