Lea is the newest edition to both Liz and I's families. Yesterday was her second month of life. Unlike we originally thought, American babies born abroad do not come automatically with US citizenship. The actual process is not difficult to go through, the hard part is not having a solid understanding of how it works ahead of time and getting to the Embassy to begin with.
Lea at 2 months:
First off, I want to prop my daughter. I know it is pretty cliche to speak highly of your child, but I have been on many planes. Lea did not cry once, she sat calmly the entire 4 hours on the flight.
Needless to say, Brasil is typically an expensive country. Taxes are high, which drives drives up prices on two fronts, the consumer side and the manufacturer's side- driving things even higher. That coupled with the factor of low ease of access makes a normal trip stressful at least. The plan was to use our trip to get Lea's citizenship as a mini vacation. We left Tuesday afternoon, and currently, we are waiting in Brasilia Airport to board our 3 am flight back to Belem.
We booked everything a couple of weeks in advance: the hotel, the rental car (because taxi's are way too high), and the flight. As I mentioned earlier, the flight to Brasilia was pretty smooth. We picked up the rental car, and outside of the ridiculous process of picking up the car, we were off on our way. Liz's parents got her a GPS that they brought down this last trip. It helped, but with all of the newly changed roads and construction in Brasilia, we got lost a lot. It was kinda cool though, we got to tour the city in a way that we otherwise would have never seen. An hour and forty-five minutes later we made it to the hotel. When we got there the gentleman behind the counter was really nice- he upgraded our room to the suite, at no charge.
The room:
Lea got to spend some time in the Jacuzzi- which was her first time in an actual bathtub! We had a great night, but were woken up pretty early the next morning to drilling and hammering. A couple minutes later the reception desk called and said that they would be sending someone up to talk to us. Come to find out they were actually sending someone up to kick us out of the hotel. Not going to lie, we were pretty aggravated, but we held it together pretty well, especially considering the World Cup games were in Brasilia at the time and hotels were hard to come by. So we went from exquisite to this:
So we ventured out into Brasilia in the search for the new hotel. Our plan was to use this day to go and visit the city, visit museums, the cultural center in order to learn more about Brasil. It took all day to find the new hotel, and by the time we got checked in to the Comfort Inn it was too late to visit the attractions.
The next morning we had just enough time to get everything ready for the trip to the US Embassy. I miss how easy things are in the US. We went in, talked to the gentleman at the Embassy, got sworn in, signed the papers and we were out. It was an awesome experience for sure!
The next day we decided to rest, but we did decide to take Lea on her first trip to Wal Mart!
All-in-all the trip was successful! Lea got all of her paperwork in to be an American Citizen! Hopefully, it will all get to us OK, and there will not be any roadblocks! God is awesome!
Thanks for all of the prayers during this process!
We are now back at home and all is well. We even decided to let Lea go swimming this afternoon for the first time:
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