Though the peacefully-sleeping-baby gods have not been with us this week (or last week, or the week before...) the US-citizenship gods are on our side! Today we received Gretchen's US birth certificate (more accurately called the Consular Report of Birth Abroad, or CRBA, certificate) and her US passport. She is officially a United States citizen now - hooray!
You may remember from my first post about
the US Passport process that we were told to expect our documents to be delivered in 10 working days. This ended up being an understatement as our original appointment with the Embassy was on April 15, 20 working days ago. No complaints here, we're just happy to receive them.
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| Gretchen is relieved that she can never be president |
These documents came with instructions on applying for a Social Security number, something that I hadn't given much thought to. According to the instructions, we can apply through the Embassy - this is nice, we thought we needed to apply in the states - but they require you to submit the baby's US passport, original birth certificate and the passport of one of the parents. Considering that we plan to travel internationally within the next month, we are going to wait until our return to turn in all of these important items.
We now have 2/3 of the documents needed to bring our child to the land of the free, more updates to come on the progress of our other adventures in
Legalizing Your Baby paperwork.
You don't actually turn over your passport, etc when applying for your daughter's SSN. You just turn them in (i.e., show them). Just like when you apply for her passport, they take copies of all the required documentation and hand it back to you. It's quite easy - I did it all for my daughter when she was born here and the SSN part is the easiest step of the process.
ReplyDeleteGood to know! Thanks so much for the tip!
ReplyDelete