Passports

The kids’ passports are expiring and we have a trip to Costa Rica scheduled for this summer. My wife made an appointment to renew the passports. My job was to gather the materials we’d need, gather the children we’d need, find out where we had to go, at what time we’d need to leave to get there, what parking was like, etc.

It was… a bit of a shitshow, and it was completely my fault. I’m not proud to be squarely in the ranks of male mediocrity here, and I’m tempted to never discuss any of this with anyone, ever, but I offer you transparency. I want to be better. I owe it to my family, to my wife, to myself.

So, here’s how it went down:

What materials did we need? Well, I took it upon myself to have a cursory glance at the website the day before our appointment, and… there wasn’t a lot of information there. So, probably just their old passports would suffice. And I (so smartly) grabbed their birth certificates for good measure. Except I couldn’t find the five-year-old’s. How we lost the most recent one, I do not know.

I find where to go, and my wife picks up one kid while I pick up the other two. Our appointment was for 3PM, so it was a bit of a scramble getting from school to the place. We arrive, it’s 3:05, we’re a little sweaty, but we’re there.

The passport woman asks us, “Have you filled out the forms?”

Strike one.

My wife and I look at each other. The woman hands us three forms and gives us pens. We fill them out, and yes, they are confusing AF.

“Do you have the birth certificates?”

“Do we need all of them?”

“Uh… if you want all the passports, yes.”

Strike two. We can’t do the little one today.

As I give the woman the other two birth certificates, I notice that someone has made a very colorful marker drawing on the back of the middle kid’s (classic middle kid, having marker all over their birth certificate). The woman points and says, “Nice drawing.” My wife is visibly embarrassed. Not totally strike three, more like foul-tip to barely stay alive.

Then the passport woman takes the kids’ photos, says she’ll hold the little one’s aside until we can come back with the birth certificate. All good there.

Then she says, “I need separate checks for each.”

Shit. There’s the strike out.

That’s when I see the very large signage saying no cash, no cards, checks only. I guess because these applications get mailed somewhere else.

The woman seems amused. “Didn’t you get the email with the list of stuff to bring?”

At this point my wife fully throws me under the bus and says, “It probably went to him.”

I’m thinking, no that can’t be.

Long story short, we go home, I check my email, and there it is from three days ago: Items you’ll need for your upcoming passport appointment.

I will do better next time. Which is at the passport appointment scheduled for next month.