Securing a passport for your child is a chore. A stressful time-consuming nuisance which should be approached the same way you approach taking preschoolers to a really boring restaurant. Seriously.
In preparing for our 23 day trip in Austria, Germany and Russia we needed to secure a passport for our oldest Xander.
Before going to the passport office you need to study the travel.state.gov website. It walks you through the process in a very straightforward way. Understanding the rules can help make your four hour wait at the passport office fruitful.
First off, both parents need to be present in order to obtain a passport for a minor. If only one parent can go to the office then they need a notarized consent from the other. At least two families in front of us in line didn't know about this rule. They argued ... but the rule is hard and fast, and they went away without successfully applying for a passport. The State Department doesn't want a child involved in a custody battle to be whisked out of the US (think Sally Field in "Not without my daughter.")
Second, you need to bring the right paperwork, including proof of citizenship, proof of parental relationship, social security id, and identification for both parents. The passport office will take the originals of your child's paperwork, and assure you that they will return it in a few weeks. We got ours back, but it is tough to hand over hard to replace originals.
On the Saturday morning we spent at the passport office, incomplete and forgotten paperwork was the biggest reason that people got turned away. I also noticed that people who didn't have the right paperwork spent the most time at the counter ... adding wait time for all of us who had studied the website.
Our passport office will take passport photos, but on that day the machine was broken. My recommendation is to go to a drug store and get the photo taken in advance. Then you have nothing to worry about other than entertaining your preschooler.
Passport offices are incredibly boring places, and the waits can be long even on a weekday. So, plan for your visit the same way you plan for a restaurant trip, with coloring books, toys and when you get desperate, your cell phone, keys, etc. Jonathan took Xander on long walks, returned to find there were only fifty more people to go ... yippee!
We got Xander's passport three weeks later, plenty of time in advance of our trip. We still haven't gone through the process to obtain a passport for Caleb. I'm putting this one off. We won't be traveling abroad again until 2011.
No comments:
Post a Comment