Small Battles.

It has been a rough ride for the last few years, but things are finally starting to look up as I am no longer 'couch surfing' due to really high Child Support deductions from my paychecks that left my living well below the poverty line, though technically I was making more money because most assistance programs are not allowed to take Child Support into account.
In the meantime I was able to make EVERY game for each of the Children and provide nice gifts for birthdays while attending every birthday party at a local Park where we played in the splash pads and had nice barbeques, like a real family.

Unfortunately their Mother had walked out on them in December of 2013 or 2014, I cannot remember exactly when and that was the story I was given by the Grandmother.
It turns out that the Grandmother had kicked their Mother out and threatened to call the Police should she return, all the while holding the Children and preventing their Mother from seeing them. A nice strategic move was to feed me a line of crap in order to gain my sympathies as their Father.
She did so in order to secure a letter from me to Child Support, along with other letters she had collected under false pretenses from various members of her Church Congregation (who had no idea that I was actually involved with the Children and had been the whole time because the Grandmother had told them I was M.I.A.).
The letter I turned in basically stated that I was assuming full Custody and was not granting Custody to Sharon, but that Child Support should continue until I secure a place to keep them, which I did by the middle of that summer, at which point I had gone out to pick them up with the help of the Police, but it was too late...
The Grandmother had enlisted the help of their Mother, basically bribed her with a truck, in order to have her present on the property to prevent me from taking them because no Parenting Plan had been finalized at that time... I had no money to do so due to Child Support and having secured a new place while waiting to start work at a new job the following week.

Their Mother still lives here in this State, as do I, but their Grandmother has taken them out of State to Utah, again, under false pretenses that their Mother is actually there and not here, although I can prove otherwise.
Now begins the long process of actually getting them back. Unfortunately I do not think this will be much help to most people out there, unless you are in similar situations, but maybe someone can garner some sort of useful information here BEFORE you get to this point so that it does not come to this.

Things are hard, especially in this State, and especially for Fathers, but things are not impossible and the best thing to do is to keep doing what you are doing, don't EVER give up no matter how hard things seem to be, no matter how impossibly high the mountain of paperwork and legalities becomes.
You really do not have the right to give up because it is your own Child(ren) at stake, the relationship is sacred and must be approached and protected as sacred.

Find the warrior within yourself and do not give up, hold your head high and, regardless how everything goes, in the end they will come back to you and you will have something to show for it by the example you set for them.