Idiots!

On Wednesday, we packed up the whole family and headed up to Toulouse to the American Consular Presence to get Aliena's US paperwork done. Basically certify her as a US citizen too and get a passport made. We actually began the process the week after her birth - but the consulate is only open one day a week (at least to the public) and they have a 6 week lead time on appointments. We emailed a few times to make sure I had all the documents we needed -- turns out their web information is not really up to date (from 2004...so they referred me to the more recent..2008...info posted by the Marseilles office - at which point I should mention that Marseilles is known as the most laid-back and unconcerned big town in france...which does not bode well for Toulouse) - but I finally managed to get it all together. One sticking point was that I needed an original copy of our marriage license...and the French one would not work...which meant that I had to get my mom to dig through files in CA to find it and send it out to us. I'm not really sure why we need this document - I mean, you don't have to be married to have kids and since Amy is American anyways, then Aliena gets citizenship regardless of who I am. I suppose that should have been an omen... Anyways, we load up the kids, drive 1.5 hours to Toulouse, park, do the whole metal detector thing (which is squished into a closet meaning that you are cuddling with the security gaurd under the metal detector as he checks your passport before letting you through the bomb-proof door), and get settled in with our pile of documents. First off, the (less-than-friendly) lady helping us did not like the passport photo -- Aliena's head was too wide and probably too big (although she did not have a ruler with inches on it to be able to measure..which I incidentally did in photoshop and know it to be under the max height allowed). I tried to explain to the lady that a baby's head is not proportioned the same as an adult's, so if you scaled the head to the proper height, it would be wider than an adult's head. This approach to scaling the photo worked for Adrien's passport, but apparently our consular 'helper' was having a bad day and thought we should too. Second, she noticed I was born in France - at which point she asked me if I had ever been to the US...which I started to laugh at until I realized she was serious. Apparently the US doesn't bother to stamp passports anymore, so my US passport (issued not from a consulate, but from the US passport office..which means I ordered it from within the US) which I've had for 9 years now does not have a single US stamp in it. This was a sticking point - she had not told me via email that I needed to bring proof that I had ever been to the US. Fortunately Amy was thinking on her toes and pointed out that the marriage certificate that we had to have sent out showed we were married in Watsonville, CA showing that I had indeed been to the US (at least for 1 day). Whew! Not so fast... since I was born in France, where was my consular certificate of birth to prove that I was a US citizen? Uh, I don't have it (and don't recall ever seeing it in my life...)...but the website printout says that a current US passport is sufficient proof of citizenship. So isn't that enough? No, I guess not. I guess as a citizen born abroad, you don't have quite the same rights (like, I can 't be president...although I can be vice-president...which would get complicated if the president died...) - be that should surprise nobody who has been listening to the 'separate but equal' arguments about 'same sex marriage' vs. 'same sex unions'. I still can't figure out why our 'helper' didn't tell us this sort of thing before we took the trek up there nor why its not listed on any of the consular literature that they provided us for preparing the paperwork. I mean, these people deal with FOREIGN BIRTHS all the time -- and really, I bet lots of the consular birth reports they have to prepare have one parent who was a citizen born abroad (the sorts of people who may be disproportionately comfortable living in a different country). And how should we know what to bring if they don't tell us? I was hoping that we could sign all the forms and mail in my extra document (and a new photo of Aliena) to complete the whole thing, but of course that would be too easy. She wants us to come back and sign in front of her when we have the form in hand. Not sure why it makes a difference if we sign now or in a few weeks....except of course that she knows that means another day of work lost for me, 3 hours of driving for the family, added air pollution, etc... Well, at least its good to know that the consular presence is there when you need their help. I'm pretty sure in an emergency I might take a gamble and drive the extra 2 hours to Bordeaux, where if the help is no better, at least I can drown my sorrows in an excellent bottle of local wine!