Passport photo

Delivering a baby here is pretty similar to what I imagine it would be like in the States, but I never would have thought about all of the paperwork you have to do when you have a new addition to the family! When our kids were born, David had to run around to all sorts of offices in two different cities. He had to get papers filled out and signed by the doctor in order to get a birth certificate written in Arabic. The next step is to get that birth certificate translated so that we can take it to the Embassy in order to get a birth cerificate issued from the States. We have to take a big stack of forms and information to the Embassy on Wednesday to get Ellie's social security card, birth certificate, and passport. There are lots of forms to fill out and lots of pages of instructions on how precisely to complete them. Perhaps the trickiest part of the process is to get a passport photo. We have held two mini photo shoots so far, and hopefully one of the pictures will be acceptable. The criteria is Ellie's eyebrows and ears have to be showing. It seems to me her eyes should be showing, so we have tried to catch her in a brief moment of awake time. Our choices include the picture shown or a number of pictures where you can see my hands as I try to hold her hands down from her face. The idea of taking a picture this early is funny to me; I feel like her picture looks just like Joshua's picture, except that Joshua never wore pink mittens! It will be good for 5 years, but she will look completely different in the next 2 months!