The Phone Call

I remember it was on a Friday evening while I waited for my husband to get off from work, he calls me on his way home. He told me that he had been talking to his mom and she told him that back in June 21 my sister-in-law's baby was taking away from her by CPS based on child neglect accusations. He wanted me to ask me if it was OK if we could try to get custody of her. At first I was shocked, I didn't know what to say... I took me a few seconds to come back and tell him Yes!!! we need to try and contact CPS in Texas and let them know that we are family and we are here. Gosh, too bad we found out on a Friday evening, that means we needed to wait until Monday so we could call CPS in Texas and get any information. I swear that was the longest weekend of my live, all I could think about was the baby. Before that I only saw her in pictures that the baby's grandma e-mailed us. She is the cutest baby ever and had my husband's eyes, same hair color. On that Monday I woke up very early and since Texas has 2 hours ahead of our time I called CPS when it was 6am here, so 8am over there. I couldn't get hold of anyone then; but I was able to leave a message and shortly after we got the first phone call.
We got the first phone call was from Julie an advocate from the program CASA in Texas. She is very nice and shows interest in the baby and what happens to her. I explained to her that we had just find out about the removal of the baby from her home and that we wanted to do whatever we needed to do to get her out of the system. CASA told me that the baby was in Foster Care since the removal and also told me that her Foster mom was a very nice lady, that cares about her and wanted to adopt her. I told her that I was happy to hear that; but that we are family and we are also interested in bringing the baby home with us and keep her within family. CASA gave me all the details of the next hearing court, The Status Hearing and we did all the arrangements for me to fly over there a few days before the court day. I kept constant communication with CASA and a few other calls to CPS, called the biological parents lawyers, talked to the biological parents, the baby's grandma, and called CPS here in California to get more information. We had a few talks to the baby's parents and at that time, they agreed that the best thing for them to do was to let us have the custody of the baby, because that way the baby was going to stay with family and they were going to keep some kind of communication with her....