Hi all,
Kind of a unique situation here. My fiance and I (same-sex couple, both guys) have been together for over six years. We are not married, but are in the process of trying to adopt a child.
We live in California and now can get legally married. BUT our adoption agency is counseling us to wait until AFTER we adopt. The reason is that we could potentially adopt a child from any state in the country, but a good number of states would not let us adopt as a same-sex married couple. They will let us adopt as an unmarried couple. Ironic, I know...
Adopting will take an indefinite period of time. We could be matched with a birth mother next month, next year or in a few years.
But while we are willing to wait until we have a baby to get married, we really do not want to wait an indefinite period of time to at least have a commitment celebration of some sort. Plus, once we have a baby, it will be quite difficult to have a wedding of the type we would want to have.
So, we came up with the following plan:
1) Have a relatively small commitment ceremony and reception in January 2014. For our purposes, this will be our wedding.
2) Once we have adopted, we would have a "welcome baby" party (very casual), that we could pair with a recognition of being legally married. We wouldn't want any formal ceremony. We were just thinking a larger party for people to come meet the baby and also celebrate the fact that we could now get legally married. Probably a barbecue in a local park or something like that. We would make this a much larger event than our commitment ceremony/wedding (which would only be close family and a few friends).
My fear is that celebration #2 would come off as a PPD. Personally, I would only have celebration #2 be a "welcome baby" party, which I know other people have. But my FIL's desperately want us to have SOME celebration of our marriage to which all extended family, etc, are invited.
Any feedback would be appreciated.
Thanks!