warning this is a long post and I wasn’t exactly sure where to post this so I just chose parenting.

I’ll just start off with I’m a very family oriented girl. I’m only 20 and the middle child of three girls. We’ve always been really close and do almost everything together. We only got closer when I got pregnant at 16 and had my daughter at 17. They supported me through finishing high school, starting college, and even getting pregnant again at 19 with my son. I am married to their father and we no longer live with my family. We decided to have my son before I started my clinical rotations at school because we didn’t want a big age gap between our kids. While I was pregnant with my son though (approximately 33 weeks) an old friend of mine from high school sent me a video on Instagram and I realized it was my 2 1/2 old daughter and my younger sister (she’s 15). My sister in the video is making my daughter smoke a juul. If you don’t know what a juul is it’s like a vape but with an absurd amount of nicotine in it. They were laughing in the video like it was funny. I was at work at the time and immediately left and I swear I was seeing red. I’m usually a very sweet, nice, and caring person but it’s true when they say you mess with my kids and momma bear comes outs because I was furious. She could of easily killed my daughter with that much nicotine. If it wasn’t for my husband and mother in law I would of probably been In jail. When I spoke to my mother about it she laughed and said she would “talk” with my sister. This only pissed me off more. She deserves way harsher consequences than that but my mom has never disciplined my younger sister since the day she was born. I mean she almost killed my daughter and was still allowed to do whatever she wanted and only got her phone taken for one day. After my mom said that we decided to call the police. Not only to protect my daughter but to protect ourselves as parents because this video had been seen on Instagram over 500 times. It was only a matter of time before it came back to us. We filed a report and decided to press charges. She needed some type of consequences and I’d rather her get them now as a juvenile then not get them and ruin her life once she turns 18. 2 weeks after this occurred she went out with friends and got caught egging people’s cars and got handcuffed and a juvenile sentence. So now she has child endangerment and vandalism for under $1,000 on her rap sheet for court. Of course my mom was furious I filed a report and pressed charges but it wasn’t about my mom and dad at this point. This is about my sister almost killing my daughter and needing some kind of consequences. This all happened back in September. It’s now February my son is 3 months old my daughter is almost 3 and we finally got the phone call about her court date. It’s a week from tomorrow. My dad called me and told me because he wants me to drop the charges because they cannot afford an attorney because my parents are currently going through a really bad divorce and they make to much money in our state to be appointed one. My father would have to take out a loan to get my sister a lawyer. I’ve always been a daddy’s girl and I hate making him go through this but I can’t just sweep this under the rug. I’m stuck because I want her to get the consequences for what she did to my daughter but I don’t want to put this money burden on my parents. She would be getting probation no matter what because of the vandalism but I can’t help feeling like that’s not enough for what she did. No matter what though my sister is not allowed to see my daughter. She hasn’t seen my daughter since this happened. That will not change no matter what the court says. I just don’t know what to do at the point.