Order Of Support, The Beginning.

September 9, 2010. my first court appearance for my custody battle. Prior to this court date i did not have any paternity rights for my oldest child who is now 9 years old. My name was not on her birth certificate because i was not present at the time of birth, although the mother and myself were still a couple. Fast forward to 10 years later the relationship was no longer working and that's when i thought about my name on her birth certificate. I know my kids mother more than anything in the world, so i knew once the relationship ended that she would do things that i feel i did not deserve (she kind of has a little girl mentality..and still does). So i knew i had to get paternity rights to my oldest daughter, if not than she would try to take her away from me for good. I filed for an order of paternity just in time, because she began dating immediately after our relationship was over and started to hate me and do some crazy things. I was granted the order of filiation, which is an acknowledgement of paternity. At the same time i requested to have her last name changed to my last name and the judge agreed and so did the mother. So now my daughter has my last name and i am legally her father. Now comes my favorite part, now i can finally file for custody of my kids. Back to September 9, 2010 my first court appearance for custody. Everything went really good for me, the referee seemed to be on my side, she was really nice to me bashed the kids mother a little. I was happy at this point, i thought this would be simple. They set another date for us to come back and I'm thinking its going to go the same way our next appearance. I got home on that day of September 9th and called my immediate family to tell them how happy i was because of how it went in court, nothing could be better now. I go down stairs check the mail and what do i see? A big white envelope, now should i have been surprised that she served me with child support papers or should i have saw this coming when i served her with custody papers. Either way that's when i realized this was not going to be an easy battle and this was only THE BEGINNING.