We are engaged and the wedding date is set. I spend my days and nights mostly researching adoption and occasionally wedding planning. In the spring of 2003 we start looking more closely at family planning. We have a lot of coordinating ahead of us. Especially with our unique situation: weddings, adopting internationally and planning biological children.
We get the calendars out, we number crunch, we do the what-ifs.
First Plan: Biological child first, adopt child second. The wedding wasn’t until April so purposeful baby-making could not commence until then. We also did not know how much time it will take to conceive a child. Plus, we had no idea what country we were adopting from. Do we want to travel to another country with an infant in tow? Absolutely not. We agreed having a biological child first was not a sensible plan. So we jumped into another round of calendar counting and what-ifs.
Second Plan: Adopt first child, then evaluate options for a second child. Researching international adoptions, we learned the timelines varied from 10 months to 2 years start to finish. With several months before the wedding, we thought it would be a smart plan to complete homestudy and the paperwork chase before the wedding. Then after the wedding we can enjoy our parents-in-waiting status without the stress of collecting documents.
Over the summer of 2003, we have narrowed down the adoption programs we were interested in. We are ready to submit our first document to officially begin the process. The infamous I600a is the form submitted to the Department of Homeland Security asking permission to legally start the process of international adoption. The government takes our fingerprints and does a battery of background checks to approve our request. I look over the instructions to fill out the form and discover that to embark on the adoption journey together, we have to be legally married. In other words, starting the adoption before we were married was not possible either.
After examining the facts, we realize we only need to provide DHS a marriage certificate to prove we are married.
Third Plan: Viva Las Vegas. We decide a romantic weekend in Vegas with a quick stop at a local chapel will solve mentioned dilemma. I can’t think of a better way to kick-off our adoption journey. Perfect plan with the bonus that this wedding will not take away nor affect our upcoming april nuptials. Since our families were unaware of our adoption plans this early on, only a few of our closest friends knew the plan. We got married on the one year anniversary of our engagement.
