Tate and Ellie are U.S. Citizens!!

So, we went for Tate and Ellie's citizenship several months ago. It was a HORRID trip that resulted in Trey's passport being confiscated due to an error found when it was being used to verify Tate and Ellie’s eligibility for citizenship. They told him to pay $100.00 for a new passport then and there or we couldn’t get Tate and Ellie’s passports. The error was not ours and if you know me you know I am not the type to pay money for someone else’s mistake so I said we were leaving and demanded they investigate the error after I clearly outlined how the mistake could not possibly have been ours. (I never should have worked at a law firm, it just fueled a fire.)

We walked in hoping to obtain two passports and we walked with one less. We could not get any information on the dispute, my self-righteous indignation over the injustice had cooled and the pressing need for passports finally urged me to suck it up and pay the $100.00. We got all packed up and headed back to the Embassy. We went through security where I got to taste the baby bottles, pulled our ticket (P 80, last time we were P74…. that’s how long we were there, I could remember the ticket number from when the babies were 5 weeks old, they are now 12) and sat in an international version of the DMV.

We sat in the waiting room and fed the babies while I coached Trey on what to say. “Don’t tell them we’re here to pay for your confiscated passport. Tell them we want to know where we are in the dispute process…” I fully expected to leave there $100.00 poorer and I figured they would probably find some other extraneous charges for us. I was thrilled beyond belief when Trey came back from the window and said that when he asked where we were in the dispute they said they hadn’t been able to get a response from the post office of Birmingham, Alabama. Honestly I probably could have made $100.00 if I could have recorded the phone conversation. “Hello, this is so and so from the US Embassy in London calling to enquire if you made a mistake when transferring the details of a passport application?” Anyone who has ever been to the downtown post office in Birmingham, Alabama knows what I am talking about. I mean, come on, they put that Trey was born in a city that doesn’t exist. Anyway, they decided not to charge us and told us we would receive all three passports in three weeks, no additional charge. Thank the Lord!

After that we had to take the bus home from Oxford Street so we stopped by Primark because we have NOTHING for 6 to 9 months for either of the babies. I got a couple of outfits to get them started.