SGD will always cling to her mother unfortunately no matter how shitty the mom is. My brother is a social worker for foster kids and has seen far worse and these kids still cling to every string attached to these abusive & neflectful parents. Im sorry you got messed up in this and you should choose to extend your trip rather than pray for snow.

If SD doesnt show, it will not show SGD was a POS she is, she will make excuses and blame others, sadly. I deal with this daily on a smaller scale with my 4 skids. Mom is a POS and the kids blame my DH and me for her shortcomings. DH didnt understand for years, i had to introduce him to the term displaced anger.

And. NO. Do not let SD move in. That going to be a disaster.   SD, SGD, and baby ??? Talk about being out number !!!

I would say absolutely not to SD staying in your home over Xmas. My guess is this is a ploy to secure a place to live (with you) for when her baby comes along. I agree with red hen that any valuables you’ve got would also mysteriously start disappearing, so the answer needs to be no. He can have a relationship with his daughter outside the home. 

As for SGD, you need to step back & stop having these talks with her. It’s your DH’s place to have conversations like this with her, not yours. If you & DH were doing it together, with him in the lead & you supporting him, that would be one thing. But you’re taking the lead where you really shouldn’t, and seemingly always when DH isn’t physically present.

You don’t need to provide a home for SGD, your DH does, he’s the one who has custody, not you. If you can’t tolerate SGD’s behaviour, which would be understandable, then you might need to live apart until SGD launches. Especially if DH falls for the sob story his DD will inevitably tell & wants to provide for her & new baby too. Not your circus not your monkeys. 

From reading your story, you are not this girls stepmother. From what I understand, your husband was previously married to a woman who a had a child from a prior relationship. This was your husbands stepdaughter. When his wife died, she would technically have ceased to be his stepdaughter. This girl that you now have custody of is his ex- stepdaughter's daughter, maybe his ex- stepgrandaughter? Not necessarily even that if his wife died before this girl was born...

This is relevant because you are posting on a stepparents website for advice. You are not a stepparent, nor are you a stepgrandparent. You are getting advice meant for step parents when what actually is is much more of a foster care situation. The dynamics you are dealing with are very different.

You have an unstable drug addicted mother who abandoned a child unsupervised and lost custody as a result. This is where you and your husband come in. The fact that this wreck of a mother once shared a legal relationship to your husband that has since been dissolved is not a huge factor in the dynamics of the situation. So first off, please stop viewing yourself as the "step," you are giving up your power when you do that, in actuality you have just as much control over this girl as your husband does.

Look into foster parent resources. Many of those children have parents who are desparate to get custody back and trash talk the fosters at every single opportunity which causes some extremely entitled and difficult to deal with children, like what you have.

The mother may have some powerful psychological hold on the child, and I understand that can be a difficult thing to deal with. However you have custody, and therefore you have all the power. Insist on sticking to supervised visitation, give the mother the bare minimum allowed by the CO regardless of how much the girl whines since the issues you are experiencing are the mother speaking through the girl. Whoever is supervising needs to be make certain that the mother is not trashtalking you during her visitation, if she is these are grounds to return to court to minimize or end visits.

The girl absolutely needs to be in therapy, since she's been removed from a neglectful parent. She is a minor and does not have a say in whether or not she attends therapy. Her legal guardians get to decide that and that means you. MAKE her go. Remove privileges until she goes. If she still will not go wait until you butt heads over something and bring her to the emergency room for a psych evaluation. Have her baker acted, do whatever parents do when their biological teenaged child desperately needs psychological counseling and physically refuses.

Counter disrespect with discipline, entitled children get nothing. From now on everything she owns comes from goodwill or the salvation army until she starts treating you both with respect. If she wants to see her mother simply draw her attention to the court order and refuse to discuss the matter any further, under no circumstances should you go out of your way to facilitate extra time with the mother as this will only give her an opportunity to further turn her daughter against you and make your life more difficult than it already is.

I have had first hand witness to a similar situation as my neighbors have custody of their grandchildren, actually, they are only the wife's grandchildren, not the husband. Their mother had lost custody due to abuse and neglect and was only allowed supervised visits in my neighbors home for an hour a week since the children were infants. The wife recently passed away, leaving the husband with custody of his two stepgrandchildren, a boy now 18 and a 15 year old girl. In his grief over his wife, he stupidly allowed the teens to start staying at their mother's on weekends. Within 2 months the boy had moved out swearing to never speak to who had essentially been his father his entire life again, and the previously respectful girl with which there had never been any issues was referring to him by his first name only, repeatedly making obviously overhead statements that he was not providing an appropriate environment for children, attempting to run away, raging at him for keeping her away from her mother for most of her life, threatening suicide, destroying property you name it. After I pointed this out to him, he finally put an end to the weekends at mom's for the minor he could still control and within 6 months the girl was almost back to normal.

Treat the girl like you would a disrespectful and difficult biological child, and minimize contact with the mother as much as possible. You may want to look into parenting advice for foster parents, since these situations are common with these children.

You will all last but it's going to be a bloody mess by the end. Don't stop trying to help SGD to become a functioning adult but fully expect her to hate you through out and after the process, never to acknowledge anything you do or sacrafice for her. She is not blood to either of you keep that in mind, and the fact that most of her behaviors are well cemented at this point and will be very difficult to modify.

I'm not trying to make this all doom and gloom but you need to be prepared for a bumpy road, be especially wary of SD she might say she is just comming for a day visit but she sounds like she is good at manipulating people to get what she wants and needs, keep a close eye and ear on her, I wouldn't trust her any further than I could throw her if I were you.

GSD obviously needs structure and she might actually thrive in it after a time but it won't be easy, these kids to addicts do cling as another poster said to even the smallest threads they can.  My GSD is 8 and has alot of tthe same entitlement issues as your GSD, however we are constantly working to break that and it's tough, once it's there it doesn't come out easily. She too wants to be with her mom, loves her mom but at the same time she knows deep down that will probably never happen, and honestly that's just sad for these kids because they deserve to be with their own parents, parents who actually step up and do the right things.

Keep posting, keep venting and keep trying, I'll have to deal with 15yo GSD eventually I need to see what's comming down the pike ( I've done it with 2 SDs already but GSDs could be different lol)