Well well well, we finally got Marc's birth certificate in the mail on Thursday. Not the copies we requested from the hospital (these would still take a couple of months since the office of Vital Records is still working in the certs for babies born in July), but the one I requested in person (more details in a post from a couple of weeks ago).
Getting the birth certificate allowed us to get started in preparing for our Christmas trip to Spain:
- we bought the air tickets before their prices get even higher.
- we applied for Marc's US passport.
- we will go to the Spanish Consulate to register Marc, apply for his Spanish passport and Lily's Spanish visa.
We also got scheduled for our green card interviews... hopefully all these procedures will go smoothly and very soon we will be able to stop worrying about visas for a while... We can't wait.
Once again though, reading through all the laws and regulations it's quite amazing to see how easy is to run into catch-22 situations. We already ran into this last year when Lily could not get a Spanish visa, we basically had everything ready for her to apply for a new US visa at the US embassy in Spain. Unfortunately she could not get a Spanish visa because she had a single entry visa for the US and therefore could not guarantee that she would be able to come back...
This time the dependencies were between Marc's SSN and passport. It's recommended to have SSN when applying for the passport, but it's almost required to have a passport when applying for an SSN (unless the SSN application is filled by the Hospital). In theory the Hospital did apply at the same time they applied for his birth certificate, however in true Chicago fashion that may take over 4 months, so I was considering re-applying in person... not a chance, after reading what it would take to verify Marc's identity as a newborn I decided to apply for his passport without SSN.... we will wait for his SSN, hopefully he'll get it before he graduates from college :)
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