I am a bad bad blogger

It's been more than a month since Erik's birthday, and I did manage to get pics of that up, but that's about all I've done. Apologies. Actually not much has been happening in a busy kind of way. ABout a week and a half ago we finally got to Sydney to go to the US Consulate to submit the 'Consular Report of Birth Abroad' for Erik. This was no mean feat I'll have you know. It involved a lot of paperwork. For a start, the beloved had to prove his citizenship. Not too hard, as he has a passport. Then for his citizenship to be transmissible to his child he had to prove that he'd been living in the US for at least 5 years, some of them past the age of 14. So he got school and university transcripts sent here. That was a bit more of a pain, as the Consulate wants 'official' copies of everything. OK, so far so good. Now for the annoying bit. We'd been advised over the phone (and the literature accompanying the application form also suggested) that despite the fact that we'd got married before Erik was born, the fact that he was conceived out of wedlock maight be a sticking point. SO we started to trawl through all our power and phine bills to prove that the beloved lives here. We made copies of all of these, as the Consulate charges $1USD/page. We also had two friends sign affadavits saying that they knew that we had been together for some time before Erik's birth. Beloved reads some more fine print which says "if you are also intending on applying for a social security number, please provide two copies of your supporting documents". Back to the photocopier. We now have three large piles of paper that are increasingly in danger of getting mixed up. Original, #1 copies and #2 copies. We put them all in cardboard files to try to keep them together. Of course when we front up at the consulate for our appointment the bloke behind the glass screened counter looks a little alarmed. I should point out that this bloke was as Aussie as they come. We'd been joking for weeks beforehand that our interview with a consular official would be with some Ivy League young thing called Chester or Chase or Savannah, but of course on the day, the preliminary stuff was all handled by some bloke called Bruce (or possibly Jayden). We did get to speak to a consular offical later, to sign the forms. His name was Christopher, and as we confirmed later, we both giggled a bit inside that most of the letters for 'Chester' were there. Christopher says "you're all done, the passport and CRBA will be sent to you in the Express Post satchel you've provided within 6 weeks, the Soc Sec number might take up to three months. Fast forward to yesterday when a courier knocks on the front door. Sure enough, it's the passport and official CRBA certificate. I pull out the camer and begin taking pics of my boys with the new passport, and then pause to read the certificate. "Bastards!" I say"?" says the beloved. "They've spelled my name wrong"... so on the phone goes the beloved, only to find that the people he needs to speak to are in Sydney, at the Consulate, and their phone number is only available between 2-4 weekdays. They haven't answered it over the last two days during that time, and the beloved has been leaving increasingly annoyed phone messages....

In the meantime, Erik has been almost learning to walk - he's taken a few steps between me and a chair - and is getting into all kinds of mischief. I fitted child locks to most of the kitchen cupboards. He still thinks that D'Arcy is the funniest thing ever, and he's still reliably using the sign we came up with for 'finished', with a few others occasionally. I've seen 'cat' and 'dog' and 'food' but none of them consistent.



I'm not sure if you can get to my other Youtube videos from the one embedded here, but there are some others that I put up at the same time that might be amusing.

Also pics at Flickr...most of which seem to feature eating, or the immediate post-eating phase.



Part of my problem right now, apart from having the beloved home for a holiday while his mom is here, is that he upgraded his laptop, so I got his old one. This means that I have the current Flash player, so I can play Lexulous and Scrabble on facebook again. 'nuff said really.