Patience?

[G-MA]

Hi.  I'm new here, what a great site!

My son (BF) and BM had a child when they were both 18 years old.  They were living with me at the time.  They broke up when child was only 3 1/2 weeks old.  My son was awarded 50/50 custody.(I believe because he did not hesitate one second, he was at the courthouse the very next day and filed on his own for custody rights.)  This first award of course was temporary.  They then were sent to see a Friend of Court Evaluator, who sided heavily with the BM, and recomended that my son only be able to visit with the child for only two hours a week.  This recomendation was to last for 90 days.  BM waited until after the 90 days to try to ask the court to follow the recomendation.  So, back to court we went.  The outcome pretty much remained the same with 50/50 custody.  Only the days each of them had with the child changed, and in fact that greatly changed for the better.(They did have the child for two on two off rotating day schedule and now they have a split week with alternating Saturdays). 

BF & BM are now both 19 and the child is now 10 months old.  The last court order was in August 2009.  As fantastic as this sounds, I have a few questions.  I don't know if the court order we have is a final order because in the order it states that the order can be reviewed after 3 months (which has now past).  Also, the order does not specify a primary or residential parent.  Is this common?  My son is very determined that he wants to become the residential parent because BM never went past 6th grade in school and all her siblings have either dropped out of school, been kicked out, or (for the young ones) are doing very poorly.  He believes, with good reason, that BM will not set a high priority on schooling, so wants to make sure he gains this residential status before the child begins school.

With that said, BF will likely ask for the next review/modification of custody.  At this point the mother is unknowingly seeming to make things easy for BF to ask for a change in custody.  She is asking BF more and more to take the child on her days.  BF gladly does each time, and has only missed one of his own parenting days because of being hospitalized.  Right now as it stands BF has had the child 57% since birth to BM 43%.  And since the court order his time with the child has averaged 65-70% per month.  BM truly does not realize this as my son will frequently give up 1 or 2 hours of his time to get an extra day or two of hers, and this is usually by her request.  We are tracking every minute, she is not.  My question on this is, how long should we wait to file for a modification?  The child is only 10 months old so we certainly don't have to rush.  However, there are some other things about the BM that concern us when he is in her care.  (prescription drug abuse, alcohol use, driving without a license, 4 boy friends in 9 months, anxiety/depression, possibly bi-polar,) well, you get the idea....  Our concerns lie more toward the neglect end rather than the abuse end of things.  The child is thriving right now and the only neglect we can say for sure is that he has come back with far too many diaper rashes, one that was bad enough to take him into the emergency room.  Otherwise, we can not say for certain that he is being neglected at all, only suspect.

I would love to hear other's thought on wether we should wait a year or so and see if she just dissapears more and more, or wether we should act sooner.  As well as things have gone so far we sure don't want to tempt fate, so to speak.