Haste to the wedding!

We have a civil ceremony date!!  Feb. 16, 2012 at 10am!!

Due to the horribly long time table that we discovered (see here), we had to rush and get all our papers in.  We had decided to get the paperwork in by this week anyway, but there was extra urgency to everything.

Last week on Saturday we went to have the medical exam done.  The district that we live in has public hospital/clinic places so we headed there to have our x-rays and blood work done.  We arrived extra early to make sure we didn't have to wait long, you have to have been fasting for the blood work to come out, and if you know Pollito, fasting and Pollito don't go together.  The x-rays were fast and then we had to wait in line to have blood drawn.  There was a little girl in front of us who had to get blood drawn and she kicked and screamed and cried the entire time, poor thing.  I just got blood drawn when I was at home, and this experience hurt a little more and it gave me nice little bruise.

This morning we went to go pick up the medical results and turn in all of our papers for the marriage folder.  We met with the doctor who went over our results.  We are both HIV and syphilis free and are in good health to be married.  We got our medical certificate, and went on our way to get some more papers notarized.

medical certificate

We took our copies of our IDs to get notarized for free at the city hall which meant more stamps for our collection of papers, and then we headed over the "Parque de la Amistad" (Friendship Park) to buy our marriage folder.  

one of my notarized passport pages

The women who handled our paperwork took quite a long time poring over my legalized, translated, legalized again birth certificate and singleness certificate.  I was afraid she was going to say that something was missing from them or that we completed the process incorrectly.  She finally accepted them and then she had to enter all the info into the slow computer.  

Both Pollito and I had to have a witness that would testify to our never haven been married before.  We used his two brothers.  This part really confounds me.  Shouldn't you NOT be able to use relatives as your witnesses to previous marriage?  Oh well.  We chose our date and then signed all the papers and that was it!  We have to return at the end of the week to collect the newspaper notice that we have to publish before we can get married.

Getting all the civil ceremony paperwork in is quite a relief, but we will only get a short respite because we have to start collecting papers for the visa process.  We also have to plan the family activities for after the ceremony, and if we are going to say vows and stuff there too.  Now, it only we could get married by this guy...