Marc smiles...

Those of you with kids certainly understand the excitement of seeing your kid's first smile... We finally started to enjoy that pleasure ourselves, so far it does not come for free, Marc mostly smiles when we play with him clapping his hands with ours... One picture is worth a thousand words...

Paperwork update...

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 :)

One more weekend flew by....

Not a whole lot to report, this was a fairly quiet weekend, after the craziness at work and the short trip to DC I took Friday off. What did we use the long weekend for? Just chill out, go for walks, go for coffee, read a little bit, clean, cook (Lily cooked some really tasty ribs on Sunday, great stuff!!!!!). The highlight of the weekend was probably our outing to downtown, we decided to take the EL and this was Baobao's first trip on the train. He slept the whole time on our way there, while we were walking around Millennium and Grant Park, when we stopped for coffee at Intelligentsia and on our way back. Amazing! He definitely sleeps like his dad, once he's focused nothing bothers him matter how much noise, vibration, people,...

A few pics from the last couple of weeks:

Blogging from DC again...

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

After more than half an hour typing a very cool and fun post, somehow I lost it all... darn you blogger, I don't like you anymore :(

I'll try again (too much for auto save)....

One more time I'm blogging from the Dulles International Airport (DC), which basically means we had another crazy week at work which resulted in a urgent trip out here to deal with another crisis... I can't say that things are getting any better or more relaxed...

We (John, my co-worked who joined me this time) and I had tickets to go back home at 9:50 pm tonight, however, we got done with most of the critical stuff at around 2pm and decided to rush to the airport hoping to make it into the 5:20 pm flight. Unfortunately, so did some other 2000 people... finally we did not make it and had to wait around (thus this blog).

Waiting in stand-by (and not being called) gives you time to witness some really interesting stuff:

- some people really wait until the last minute to board.
- even better, some of this people don't really get stressed out about it even a tiny bit. This one guy literally came walking as he had all the time in the world, enjoying the airport decoration at 5:19pm, approached us and asked us if they were already boarding the 5:20pm flight... ALREADY????? Did you mean STILL??????? What the hell....
- I don't understand how they manage the stand-by list thing. Today they really created a big mess, in the last 5 minutes they decided to let some of the folks in the stand-by list in ("just sit wherever you see a seat available"), basically assuming that the actual folks with boarding passes would not make it. Sure enough 2 minutes later a family of five showed up running at full speed through the terminal..... all of a sudden they had more folks into the plane than they could sit, what a mess.... I'm happy I wasn't one of them, otherwise they would have to call the national guard to get me out :)
- I also don't understand what the lady in the boarding desk types in her computer, but it's gotta be some really complicated stuff, like nuclear reaction formulas, the new federal budget for 2009 or something.... it always reminds me of "Meet the parents".

Anyway, I have some time in my hands so decided to post, too bad I could not make the other flight, I would be almost home by now... the good side is I'll get lots of stuff done tonight and I'll take tomorrow off, LIFE IS GOOD.

It's tough to be a mom... and a baby...

No explanation needed, I took this picture today at noon, after his feeding Marc fall asleep in mom's arms... and she followed soon. It doesn't get any sweeter than that, when I saw them enjoying their sleep like that, I can't stop thinking how blessed I am to have them both in my life.



This other one shows mom and Marc all pimped and ready to go out for a walk (Marc is wearing his first pair of blue jeans, talking about cool).

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