Sept 17--Passport and Embassy Doctor

This morning, Brian left with Helena to get Silas's new birth certificate. They then came and got us to go get Silas's passport. 

On the way to get Silas's passport. Do you think it safer to have Silas sitting on my lap in my arms or snapped into the Baby Bjorn? Hmmm. Today, we went with the Baby Bjorn. Brian holds onto Lucia. We figure since she is bigger she needs his strength.

Getting Silas's passport picture. Notice the Simpsons, ha ha. Oh, another funny thing. At night, we are watching Latin American Idol. The judges personalities and looks are just like Randy, Paula, and Simon. They even sit in the same order. We can't escape U.S. influence! Another example is when we were touring scenic Monserrat up in the mountains (see previous post), the souvenir shop was playing a Miley Cyrus video.

Waiting to get our passport. Pictured is Helena, our facilitator.

This is the Embassy doctor who performed Silas's required physical and immunization check, which is the last step before obtaining Silas's American visa. We have this same picture of this doctor holding Lucia. The only reason we can't leave this Saturday is that the U.S. Embassy does not process visas on Fridays. We tried begging them on the phone for an hour and sent emails asking them to make an exception. They wouldn't budge. Having to wait until Monday cost us $2000 b/c of the charge of changing our plane ticket, as well as the added hotel expense. Brian also went to the Delta counter at the airport and explained our circumstance and asked for grace for the penalty fee. Delta had no such grace to spare. We are now thinking that we should have called the Embassy on Tuesday, but we didn't know. One day. We missed it by one day. Huge feelings of frustrations.

Flower stand at the park near our hotel (taken from the cab). When we arrived back to the hotel, it was party time (the hotel had a band), which honestly was a little hard b/c we were feeling frustrated with the Embassy. I felt like crying b/c I had my hopes us that maybe we would travel Saturday. But we soon were able to accept our reality and settle into enjoying the wonderful celebration of getting to this point in the process. Adoption truly is a blessing and looking in our sweet son eyes grounds us. See the next post to read more about the party at the Halifax!