W with the American flag he was awarded by the nice lady at the Embassy.

My son is officially a U.S. citizen! Today we went to the Embassy and applied for his Consular Report of Birth Abroad (like a U.S. birth certificate for citizens born outside the country) and his passport.

The process for doing this is easy but not exactly simple, if that makes sense. To get W citizenship, I basically had to prove two things:
- he is my child and
- I am a U.S. citizen, having resided in the U.S. for at least five years, including two years after the age of 14.

Probably someday soon proving your child is your child will be as simple as a cheek swab at the Embassy. However, right now it involves producing prenatal and hospital documents (bills, ultrasounds, etc.) and photos from pregnancy and the hospital (so take those photos no matter how cow-like you may feel!)

The second part, proving residency, involves showing documents like school transcripts, W2s and social security earnings statements. I managed to patch together the required five years using a high school transcript, a grad school transcript and a W2. The lady who helped me looked at the W2 and asked me if that was a full-time job for a full year. Apparently she was unfamiliar with TV news salaries, hahaha.

If I had to do it all over again, which I probably will for the next baby, I would have made my life easy and requested an undergrad transcript some time ago. See, you need more than five years of transcripts because summers don't count, and obviously neither does study abroad. Anyway, since I couldn't remember my Georgetown login and password and couldn't be bothered to send a fax to recover them (I mean, who sends faxes anymore anyway??), I went for a more haphazard approach and it was fine.

I have to say, the paperwork was daunting. One part required me to list the dates of my physical presence in the U.S. and other countries. I was freaking out for a moment because I have been blessed to travel abroad a lot since childhood, but fortunately this list did not have to be as exhaustive and specific as I first thought. So aside from that, the hardest part was probably getting an 8 week old to wake up and open his eyes for a passport picture.

We were at the Embassy for about four hours. You can't bring your cell phone in, but the people-watching possibilities more than made up for it. For instance, I got to hear a man explain why he was trying to get citizenship for a child he fathered with a woman who was not his wife/the mother of his five other children. The foreign service officer asked him if he was having marital troubles, and he said no. Hmmm, maybe you should ask his wife!! Oh, also? He said he was a missionary. It would have been funny if it wasn't so totally appalling.

When all was said and done (and eavesdropped on), we were approved! W should get his CRBA and passport in a few weeks, and my renewed passport is on its way, too. Bonus.

(In case you're wondering why I went into such great detail about this process and not about how W became a Mexican citizen, it's simple — he was Mexican the day he was born, and definitely officially Mexican the day we got his Mexican birth certificate. That process was short, simple and ended with a charming request for a *tip* from the clerk who shuffled the paperwork. Here's a tip, lady: THIS IS YOUR JOB.)