Next steps, help please

Hi... here's our long longggg story.

I arrived in the UK in 2008, on a 6 month visit visa. The plan was to meet my now husband, whom I met online. When we met, it was love at first sight and he refused that I return home as he did not want to be without me again. We applied for permission to get married and it was granted to us, but during the time they had my passport and my visa expired. According to the officers at Citizen Information we were following the right path and they advised us to get married (February 2009) and then apply for the visa. My son’s joined us in October 2008, off course this did not work out for us and after months and months of fighting and getting no-where; we were advised to move to another EU country.

We arrived in Ireland on 1 August 2010; my husband had been here 3 weeks already to acquire work and a place to live. Upon arrival the immigration officer at Cork airport confiscated our passports; he refused us permission to land, but he let us enter into Ireland and gave us until that Sunday to acquire flights out of Ireland.

We did not leave again and immediately set out to apply for stamp 4 visas, once again fighting for the right to stay together as a family. Immigration accepted our application and requested documents. After a few months and many phone calls to Ireland Immigration Council, I finally spoke to a very helpful officer, whom gave me an email address of a high ranking garda official. I sent out an email explaining everything that had happened, he replied within days promising to look into our case. A few days after that he sent an email stating that we could finally collect our passports from Cork Airport, we were so happy.

On 4/4/2011 our application was refused on the grounds that we did not submit the necessary documents listed. We requested a review of the decision and this time we could send in our passports. Unfortunately at this stage we made one of our big mistakes, we did not take our passports to the local immigration officer, as we did not know that we needed to or that we will again hinder any other processes.

In early August 2011, there was a knock on the door. It was two Immigration officers, my husband invited them inside and they explained to us that they were at our door to investigate that we are indeed living together. We had to show them how we were sleeping, both my son’s had their own rooms at the time and off course my husband and I were in one room, sharing a double bed, like normal married couples do, we even had to show where our clothes cupboards where.

Our review was successful and we received permission to remain for 5 years on 17/8/2011. We were ecstatic and for the first time since arriving in Ireland the letter contained a paragraph stating that we had to register at the local immigration officer. Whoop whoop, finally a win for us.

On 1 Feb 2013, we did a stamp4 application for my mother, whom had come to live with us permanently, my father passed away in 2012. As there were no-one to take care of her back in South Africa, my brother supplied a letter from him employer stating the hours he was working and that it was impossible for him to care for her. She had gone through numerous operations since 2003, with a lot of medical problems.

On 1 Aug 2013 her application was refused on the grounds that we did not supply satisfactory evidence of dependency. So once again we requested a review and this was granted to her on 14 May 2014. Since I have personally gone through the process and had her passport, she had temp stamp4 in her passport since the first letter was received. Whoop whoop, our second big win.

Recently we got news that we are expecting a little baby, God smiling down on us giving us this massive present. My sons are 19 and 17 years old, so it was the last thing we expected. Our little one is due to arrive on 16 Jan 2015. We know that baby will receive Irish Citizenship, on grounds of her/his father being EU and we will have more than 3 years on our visas.

Due to our history with immigration and always getting the “HARD” road, we are very concerned and do not want to take the wrong steps this time around.

So the main question: What would you suggest our future steps should be to acquire citizenship and when to start those applications.

Should we apply for permanent residency, as we do not have the year temp eufam stamp 4 in our passports and then apply for citizenship in 2016?
Apply for another 5 year stamp4 eufam?
Or should we wait until our 60months residence and then just apply for citizenship?

Here is a breakdown of our dates.
For me and my sons
01 Aug 2010 - Entry without leave to remain
04 Apr 2011 – application refused
17 Aug 2011 – Review successful, first stamp4 eufam in passports

For my mother
01 Feb 2013 – First application made, received temp stam4 eufam in passport
01 Aug 2013 – application refused
14 May 2014 – Review successful

Thank you kindly for reading my book and we would appreciate any advice/assistance very much.