passports

Last week we finally filed for Anna's American passport in preparation for our coming travels to New York for the holidays. We had dragged our feet for awhile, mostly because, living in Tartu, everything seems so far away, and Tallinn? That's like a 2+ hour drive!

Things got worse two weeks ago when I smashed my driver's side mirror, rendering my ability to navigate the treacherous Tallinn-Tartu highway highly suspect. So we decided that we would have to take either the train or the bus to get up to Tallinn.

We also got Anna's passport photo taken. I was dreading this because Marta was such an active baby that we had a really hard time getting her to sit in one place for a passport photo shoot. At the photo shop they sat Anna on a chair and Epp held her back. Though she was kind of crooked, the photo came out well enough. We also noticed that Anna's left ear appeared gigantic in the photos. Epp checked to make sure that it was just the angle of the photo, and that our daughter really wasn't deformed.

I finally booked an interview with the consular officer -- Anna had to be present for the interview -- for Dec. 3. But the very same day Epp received an invitation to appear on the TV program Paar to discuss blogging. Because Epp is now marketing some new books and the invitation to be interviewed by Marko Reikop was hard to resist, we decided, ah, what the heck, let's go to Tallinn by bus. I called the embassy back and got an appointment for the next day.

The trip to Tallinn was nice on the bus. It was the first time, outside of a quick journey to Ahja in Põltsamaa, which is to the south of Tartu, that Anna had even been outside of the city of her birth. Anna watched the snow-covered trees outside the bus window with interest. This was her first journey into the magical outside world.

The US embassy has a glass guard house in front of it and when we got there we were told that one person at a time had to enter the house and go through the metal detector there. I was a bit concerned that they wanted Anna somehow to go through the detector alone, but no, Anna and Epp went together and I went separately.

Filling out paper work is funny. There are some little idiosyncrasies, especially the question of where was Epp born. Epp was born in Viljandi, Estonia, a city in the southern part of the country. But since her parents were registered in Tallinn as students, Epp was registered there too. So all Epp's documents list her birthplace as Tallinn, where she was not born.

Then there are lovely questions like, on what date did you first meet your spouse? All of you marrieds out there, try to answer that question. I know I met Epp in the first week of August, 2002 in Helsinki, Finland. But I have no idea whether it was the 5th or the 6th or maybe we didn't really meet until the 7th. Nobody really knows. It's a date lost to history.

Even better was the part where I had to list all the times I had been absent from the United States. Can you imagine? I've been to Canada three times in the past three years. So for those handful of dates, I was absent from the US! Then there was that trip to Mexico in 1988. I remember it was in February. I remember I ate fried bananas. I remember Ian had mononucleosis. I remember we all got Montezuma's Revenge. I remember a lot of things, except I don't remember exactly what dates we were there.

I didn't need a passport to enter Mexico then, and I doubt my folks needed one either. So how could I inform the embassy of which dates I was absent from the United States in 1988? Again, lost to history. I am sure the hotel we stayed in doesn't even have records of it. So I told the embassy I was there in February 1988. Good enough, right?

I was relieved when the consular officer told me that the forms had to be true to the best of my knowledge. Yes, sir, consular officer, sir! To the best of my knowledge those forms were accurate. That is the undeniable truth. The only question would be how reliable my knowledge is.

Anyway, the consular officer was pleasant on that snowy day in Tallinn and told us that Anna's passport photo was one of the better ones he had seen of a baby. For some odd reason, I'm proud of that.