After battling San Diego County child welfare officials for more than three months, a San Marcos couple whose baby daughter has a rare bone disease regained full unsupervised custody of their two children Thursday and were cleared of any suggestion that a broken leg the infant suffered in June was the result of abuse.

"I'm on cloud nine. I've got a baby on my hip, and I'm right where I should be," Heather Reynolds, 25, said Thursday after returning to her San Marcos condominium to reunite with her family

"The kids are happy, everyone's elated," she said.

Her husband and the baby's father, Trevor Reynolds, 28, said he was "a little bit numb" to be back with his family.

He had been barred from living with his wife and children, able to see them only on supervised visits.

Heather Reynolds, a nursing mother, had been allowed to live with her children but only under the supervision of another family member other than her husband.

A Vista Juvenile Court commissioner, in an unscheduled hearing Thursday, ordered an end to the investigation that child welfare officials began June 9 after the parents took the infant first to an urgent care center and then to a hospital.

Despite a doctor's diagnosis that Rebecca Reynolds almost surely has a condition that causes her bones to be so brittle that something as simple as changing a diaper can cause a fracture, child welfare officials persisted in arguing that they should retain supervision over the family, be allowed to inspect their home unannounced and require the parents to undergo counseling and attend parenting classes.

They dropped that argument Thursday after court Commissioner Michael J. Imhoff, in a hearing Wednesday, refused a request by child welfare officials to require genetic testing as further confirmation of the doctor's diagnosis, said a lawyer for the Reynolds family, Donnie Cox.

"To be vindicated, it's the best feeling ever, after months of all this legal combat, all the coercion, the threats, the empty promises," Trevor Reynolds said Thursday. "To be accused of something you know in your heart you didn't do, to be accused of being the kind of person you know you're not, it's the heaviest burden I had to bear, but I don't bear it any more."

Heather and Trevor Reynolds said they had no idea their infant had osteogenesis imperfecta until June 9, when they brought her first to a San Marcos urgent care center and then by ambulance to Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in San Diego. The condition afflicts about 50,000 people in the United States.

The baby was injured when her father fell asleep with the baby beside him while Heather Reynolds was at a dental appointment, the family said. No one knows exactly what happened, but Trevor Reynolds said when he awakened and his wife returned, the baby was fussing and couldn't be comforted.

The emergency room doctor who treated the baby initially told officials that her injury could have been caused by abuse.

At that point, child welfare officials stepped in and told Heather and Trevor Reynolds that they had to leave the hospital. Officials also took the couple's 2-year-old son from his grandmother, who had been baby-sitting him in her Oceanside home, and placed him in the Polinsky Children's Center in San Diego for five days.

A Kaiser Permanente doctor who specializes in osteogenesis imperfecta, Mark Nunes, later examined Heather Reynolds and the baby. He determined that the mother surely had the condition and that the preponderance of medical evidence showed that the infant had it as well.

If there's any good that came out of their ordeal, Heather Reynolds said it was learning that their daughter has the bone condition so they can seek proper treatment.

According to the Osteogensis Imperfecta Foundation Web site, treatment often includes physical therapy and exercise to increase strength and medication to strengthen bones.

"I guess that's the silver lining," she said.

But she said her son still has nightmares from the time he spent in Polinsky Center.

"When he first got out, he had diarrhea and vomiting," Heather Reynolds said. "It was really terrible."

She and her husband also face the prospect of being billed by the county for the costs of investigating the child's injuries, and for the parenting and counseling classes the couple started attending at the county's insistence.

Their lawyer, Cox, said he intends to file a claim with the county to recover those costs and to cover other expenses Heather Reynolds and her family incurred. He said what happened to the Reynolds family was "an outrage."

Call staff writer Ray Huard at 760-901-4062.