Herding Cats...

One of the items on our to do list is to get Kitty her passports. Due to the fact that she has dual citizenship, she must carry both a US passport as well as one for the UK. It gets a bit tricky when traveling because if she is entering or leaving the US or its territories she must produce her US passport. If entering or leaving the UK or one of its territories she uses her UK passport. This should make any excursions to the Virgin Islands fun, trying to keep up with which country owns which island. If its Tuesday, it must be the United Kingdom.

Each country not only requires different documentation, but the photographic requirements of each application require different sized photographs with different facial ratios. No problem, just to go to Walgreens where they have kiosks to manipulate photos to each country's specifications. Not so fast cowboy.

I am married to the world's thriftiest Scot ever and when he found out that Walgreens would require the princely sum of $20 he stated that I had a wonderful camera and editing software so I should just do it all myself and print up the 2 different sized sheets which would cost $1.60 total. Now I am all for saving money but sometimes it is worth spending the extra cheese in order to make things easy. This is especially true since Kitty has figured out how to crawl with lightening speed and has not stopped moving since she made this discovery. Here are some of the attempts I made in order to do the simple task of getting the photos to attach to her applications.


Here we have a solo attempt by me to photograph Kitty against the required white background. Kitty thought the dangling camera strap looked very interesting and that she Must. Have. It. Now.

Another attempt against the required white background. Full credit to Kitty's lightening fast reflexes. The kid is getting quicker. This time I didn't even manage to get any part of her in frame before she took off.

We thought we'd get clever and restrain our little mover and shaker by placing her in a high chair. She rewarded our efforts by giving us approximately 20 frames with a similar expression. Isn't this fantastic? Doesn't she look  JUST like a celebutante in a pre rehab mug shot? I blame her father for trying to teach her to sing Amy Winehouses' 'Rehab".

In the end, I think it was a fit of compassion on Mark's part that caused him to say "Just take her to Walgreens already". Le sigh. I took her in just before her afternoon nap when she was too tired to do anything but sit very still in the little chair and stare blankly into the camera as the photo tech snapped her photo. 5 minutes pushing keys and we had the appropriate sized photos with the proper facial ratios. Best $20 I've spent in a long while.

Now we just wait for a few weeks and we should be able to travel where ever we like. Except Cuba. Well, some of us can go to Cuba but some of us can not. Never mind, I'm not going to get political. I'm just going to sip my tea from my Made in China mug and finish this post.

And finally, a photo that had too much shadow to be useful but this is such an accurate photo of our cheeky little monkey. We should have her passports in hand soon, which is a very good thing. At 9 months old, she has her first real word. Its not "mama" or "daddy", its "bye bye" complete with the appropriate hand gesture. This is a kid who was born to travel and she and I are on the same page. We are both really, really ready to lose the docklines and go "bye bye".