Finally! After weeks and weeks of nail biting anxiety, we finally got Trey’s passport in the mail. The passport department made a typo and entered his name as Roger William Haun lll (no, those are three L’s not 1’s or I’s). This simple typo caused his name to not match up with his Social Security name and therefore his passport application was put “on hold.” Apparently, “on hold” means “we set it to the side and don’t bother telling you something is wrong.” On top of that we couldn’t check his application’s status on the passport website because our searches for his Social didn’t pull him up (remember the 3 L’s?). After 7 weeks and literally 4 hours of waiting on hold the kind lady on the phone realized the mistake and fixed it. It was then another 4 weeks before we got the passport

Ah… bureaucracy! Now we’ve shipped the passport off to the Ghanaian embassy to get a visa for our upcoming trip (more on that later). Let’s pray the visa process isn’t as convoluted as the passport one was!

Click Trey’s photo to see a larger version of his cute little passport mugshot. We shoot our own passport photos because it is 1) cheaper and 2) they look better than when you get it done by some pimple-faced teen at Walgreens. The US Passport site has a very handy guide that explains all the rules you have to follow for shooting passport photos. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist.

Trey’s photo was shot in our bathroom against a white towel with Heidi holding him up. Here is the original photo if you care to see how the magical powers of Photoshop turned it around.