Chess Match with Jana

So here’s the update with Jana. (to get the background on the story, go to our "These are the times that try men's souls" post)

(inhale, exhale, cleansing breaths…)

On December 14th, we sent her a letter from our lawyer, which stated the following points:
1. Jana is claiming approx. $6,000 from us for past-due daycare. We assert that she has never given us the location/contact info for the daycare, and she has within 30 days of the billing each month to give us that information, according to Utah state law. Since she hasn’t, we are willing to pay only 3 months worth of back-daycare, but she has to provide us with receipts and the contact information of the daycare.

2. Jana wants us to pay half of Ava’s daycare expenses, which Jana claims is $750/month and we are claiming that that is not a reasonable rate.

3. We will only pay half of what is reasonable and we need to agree on a reasonable rate.

4. We want visitation.

5. Jana needs to pay for most of the travel expenses associated with visitation because Jana is the one who moved out of state.

6. If she wants us to pay for half of daycare from this day forward, she has to provide us with the contact information for the daycare.

We told her she had 10 days to respond.

She hasn’t responded.

And here’s the other deal. Jana moved to Washington state (where her parents live) in April 2006. The way we found out is because the daycare in Utah sent our check back to us, saying she is no longer there.

Here’s the other deal that Jana’s been ornery about. Jana wants the venue changed from Utah to Washington. She hasn’t told us the reasons why, but we figured out the following:

1. If Jana changes it to Washington, there is no law in WA saying that she has 30 days to provide us a receipt for daycare. There is no limit to how long she can go, piling up the daycare costs and then stick us for it.

2. If Jana wants to sue us, we would have to travel to WA to defend ourselves, thus making it more of a headache for us.

3. If Jana wants ½ of daycare, all she has to do is give the receipts to WA state and they AUTOMATICALLY garnish Charles for it. Where in Utah, the state doesn’t garnish daycare, she has to communicate with us about it.

In order for her to change the venue, she would have to take us to court. She thinks that closing the case with the Office of Recovery Services (who handles child support) is enough to change the venue and it isn't. The child support people go off of a court order, and the court order is from Utah. She would have to get a new court order, stating why it is better for all parties to change to Washington... and we'll never agree to that. We'll fight that.

She’s been trying to go about this underhandedly. She was raunching us out about moving it to WA state and we anticipated that she would close the child support case in Utah… and so a guy at work told me that Charles could open the case in his name if she were to do that, so we hurried and filled out an application and sent it to the state of Utah. They received it on 12/27 and Jana indeed closed it on 12/31. So it was reopened the same day under Charles’ name. (Hee hee… Jana will find that out in the next week or so).

AND through the state of Utah, if we have Ava on our medical insurance, we get an insurance credit off the child support because Jana has to pay for half of the insurance. (and WA state doesn’t give an insurance credit). So currently, our child support is $257/mo, down from $292/mo.

But Jana also requested a modification to the order, which means they re-evaluate Jana and Charles’ incomes and adjust how much support she gets. And when she realized that Charles wasn’t making any more money than he was 3 years ago, (and she WAS), it wasn’t going to go her way, so she requested a stop on the modification. So we told the state of UT to still go ahead with it. HA~

So anyway, since Jana hasn’t responded, we’re not sure what to do- take her to court for visitation – thus costing us tons of money that we don’t have… or just let it go.

ALSO, Jana has an older daughter from another guy. We researched him through the WA courts and found him. We’ll call him Mr. X. He has all of these domestic violence cases against him, so we’re not sure if we should contact him. But when Charles dated Jana, she would gloat over how she was screwing him out of all this money. It would be interesting to hear what she’s done to him.

(yeah, we’re all thinking the same thing… “Charles, why’d you date her?”)

So we’re in a quandary. We feel that we definitely want visitation, but we absolutely don’t want Jana a part of our life. And we’ve found that opening communication with her has been to our disadvantage. She’s very litigious. And we wonder, what is really the best thing? Jana disrupting us all the time asking for money? Even if Charles gets granted visitation, Jana could still prevent him from seeing Ava, then we’d have to go back to court to say she is in contempt of court.

What a freaking mess.

We stay up at night, trying to speculate what Jana’s next move is and trying to plan our next move on our speculation.