About a month before Zachary was born in January we decided to schedule a trip to Turks and Caicos in May. We are going to take one of those Beaches tours where we can wake-up and have Elmo excercise with us or bake cookies with Cookie Monster. As part of the reservation process we made a reservation for the yet to appear Zachary offering him a name even though he wasn't going to be arriving for another 6 weeks or so.

So we were committed to getting him a passport back then since T&C is a foreign enough location to require a passport for us all. When Zachary was born, at home, we had no idea of the difficulty we would face in acquiring a passport for him. But here is the basic story thus far of our adventures to acquire positive identification for him. It started when I went to city hall to file the paperwork for his birth certificate. The basic workflow is that first you get a birth certificate then a social security card and then a passport. So I knew there would be three steps.

With a home birth there apparently is some increased risk of creating fraudulent children so the city of Newton and the state of Massachusetts are quite leary of us. In a hospital they would trust the physicians and the automated systems and punch out a social security number automatically. They are also leary about us because our house has two addresses but I'll get to that soon. At city hall I quickly was able to register to vote and then a nice clerk let me know that I couldn't get my birth certificate processed unless I brought a copy of my marriage license.

So I went home to look for my marriage license and was unable to locate it. Since Brookline City hall has these sorts of things on file I went in person to Brookline a few days later to see if I could get a copy or two made of the marriage license. Unfortunately when I first got there they were doing so much construction on city hall that I couldn't find my way to the door and needed to turn back so that I could make a meeting. Then when I finally figured out where the location was for the temporary town clerk's office they mentioned that all of their files including my marriage license was stored in the part of the buildings that were under construction. So we discussed the whole thing and I had them mail me the license since I didn't think I was ever going to get around to pick it up in person.

About a week later the license came in the mail. About 8 days later Sarah finally had the time to go to Newton City Hall to bring it to the town clerks office. Upon receipt of the item I figured I was on my way to getting a birth certificate for Zachary. But I received a call a few days later letting me know that the paperwork couldn't be sent on to the state processing folks because our official address in the logs for the tax payers is 80 Glen Ave. and the paperwork from the midwife said 80 Leeson Lane so they would need me to come and resolve it in person by signing some documents at City hall.

So we cleared-up that mess in about a week and were happy to know that we could get a birth certificate about 14 days later when I picked it up. Feeling confident that we were well on our way towards a citizen child we asked what to do to get a social security number. The answer was to go in person to a social security office in Waltham where they handle people like us. So on a day full of weather Sarah gathered the kids and took the birth certificate to the people at the social security office. They were happy to asisst her but sent her home because they need TWO forms of positive identification and the birth certificate was only one form of identification. Now I may be naive about global terrorism but I don't have a driver's license for my 8 week old child. When offered the documentation from the midwife that was used to process the birth certificate the social security folks said that the documentation was equivalent to the birth certificate so it couldn't count as a second form of identification. Sarah returned to the office about a week later with some medical bills and the documentation from the doulah and despite the policies of the US Government they agreed to send Zachary his social security card.

So just yesterday we received in the mail a new social security card. Now all we need to do is get a photo of Zachary and apply for a passport! How hard can that be?