Weddingbee boards

I have a question for bee's with children with exes, if you needed to serve your ex with contempt of court paperwork and you've had to file it three times and the sheriff has not been able to serve him because he won't answer his door, would you use your kids as a ploy to get him served? 

Basically, my ex has nothing to do with my two daughters anymore (they're 10 and 6).  They have not seen him since the end of june 09.  They've gotten to the point where they don't even ask about him anymore.  I need to serve him with contempt of court paperwork for child support and daycare expenses.  I hired a lawyer and he's had to file paperwork with the court twice, we're filing again for the thrid time.  Each time the sheriff tries to serve him, but he doesn't answer the door.  Now my lawyer is suggesting a meeting with the kids in a public place and have the sheriff serve him.

I'm really uncomfortable about doing this.  First of all because I don't think they should be in the middle of this.  Secondly, there's an issue with even having them there because the sheriff only serves M-F between 9 and 5 and my kids are at school (all of their "days off" have been taken away for snow days).  so I could try to set up a fake meeting, but then I think that's bad too...

What would you do in my situation?

That's the problem, he's not employed, so whenever the sheriff has come over I'm sure he just looked out the peep hole of his apartment and didn't open the door.  My lawyer found out that we can get a special request from the judge and have a private investigator serve him (which of course costs more money), but I think I'm going to go with the ruse that I need him to sign permission slips for passports for the girls (I've been meaning to get them anyway) and then have the PI right behind me.  Have to make sure he signs the permission slips first - right?

My lawyer was saying that other parents have even gone as far as telling the ex that their child was in a major accident and they were served at the ER (of course the child was not even there).  Pretty sick that we have to go to all this trouble/create these lies to get our exes to do the right thing. 

I think your interests are good not to involve the kids. They may never remember it, but the few interactions the have with their bio dad should be positive, if possible (to the extent you can control that).

The PI should be able to do something creative, but if you need the signatures anyways, that sounds like a good approach.