Our Adoption Story – Adventures as a Family of Four
September 19, 2018
After we appeared in court we had the freedom to travel anywhere within the state that we wanted until we got word that we were cleared to travel home. After a domestic adoption the state you are adopting from has to communicate with the state you are traveling back to and all states need to be in agreement with the placement so you can legally take the child across state lines. You can read more about ICPC or Interstate Compact on the Placement of Children here.
We were told to give ourselves up to two weeks from birth before we would be able to go home. Typically the minimum is at least 10 days. Our court appearance was on a Wednesday and we thought that we would at least be staying in the state through the weekend so we decided to go on a mini road trip for a couple of days. We left that morning and headed south towards Cedar City, UT. We planned to spend a couple of days visiting Zion National Park and Bryce Canyon before heading back to the city to wait for our clearance.
We arrive at our hotel late afternoon with plans to get dinner and settle in for the evening. We got a call from our case manager saying that our ICPC paperwork had cleared and we were free to go home if we wanted. We were shocked that the clearance took less than a week from her birth to process and now we were over 4 hours away from the city. We opted to spend the planned two nights in Cedar City and take advantage of the time we had to spend in this beautiful state and fly home on Saturday.
I don’t need to go into too much detail about our time in southern Utah since this is an adoption story and not a travel post however I should say that if you are ever in the area I highly recommend visiting both locations and leaving a good chunk of time or a whole day for each park. And speaking from experience don’t let having little kids stop you! We had plenty of looks and comments about our 1-week old baby in the park. We kept to the paths that were handicap accessible and allowed us to have our stroller. It was much easier than you might expect. The memories we created with our family are ones we will always hold dear.
One thing I wish we could have done was hike down into the canyon at Bryce but I wasn’t confident with the baby carrier at her age and the hike would have been difficult. If you have good shoes and a hiking backpack for your child it would be well worth it.
I’ll also leave you with some beautiful images of the views we were able to capture from our (somewhat) limited access.
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