Passport

Planning for the UK trip was sort of a blur.

I was waiting for my work trip to materialize. It kept dragging on. Maybe it was happening, maybe it wasn’t. I kept feeling stubborn about it, where I really just wanted to know if I was going because it would have saved me $2300 on a plane flight.

Which is a fair amount of money to save.

But after four weeks, I was sitting at my desk during the evening hours and I just thought to myself, does it matter? Just go!

There was a lot of feelings involved but the only one who was going to decide was me. So I decided. Which was funny because I asked Sam and she immediately said she couldn’t do it. But then called me up 10m later to tell me her roommates told her she was being ridiculous and she could do (all the other stuff) any other time and to go to Europe.

So I booked it.

And I remembered that I had renewed our passports last year before France so all was well.

I completely forgot about the fact that the kids passports expired in Feb and I had “planned” to take the winter break and renew them since things would be “quiet”. Never mind Sam’s surgery.

So 8 days before the trip, Sam had come home for a doctor’s appointment and we were sitting at the kitchen table. I had grabbed all the passports because I had been complaining for 3 weeks how we needed to do this UK visa thing and anyway… here we were…

Sam picked her’s up and said something like, “Mine expired last month, is that okay?” She was being really calm. And she jokes like that. The whole family is filled with jokes, they are improv kids.

I said something like, “Yep, that’s cool.”

She was so calm.

Because I thought she was joking, I was also fairly calm. I picked it up… wow. Yeah, that passport expired.

Justin was calm but I could see him typing into his computer looking up passport details.

The short story is that I calmly looked up appointments, immediately made her one in San Diego for Tuesday at 8:30am, filled out the paperwork, printed it out, pulled out two checks, her social security card (we didn’t need it but you know, just in case), plus her birth certificate (also didn’t need it!), and explained everything to Sam very carefully. She very carefully read over everything.

I’m proud of myself for being calm. I definitely felt anxiety but it was this weird calm place of… we checked in time. We messed up but were able to make an actual appointment, get everything together, and it all worked out.

I did make Sam go there on Friday to try and get it earlier but they were so nice, said it wasn’t possible, but her Tuesday appt would be fine and helped her out.

It was actually such a great experience for her. She said the building was beautiful. The people were so nice.

I was glad she didn’t have to go to LA.

I did pat myself on the back for this exchange.

Yes, I am awesome.

We leave in a day and we have the passports!

Half of us may be sick, almost getting sick… something. But it will be okay.