Monday, 30 June 2008
Fighting terrorism in its infancy
In planning our trip to my brother's wedding this summer (woohoo!), we were faced with the challenge of figuring out how to transport an infant across the ocean. And in so doing we discovered that the whole business has become a lot more complicated "in a post 9-11 world"—whether out of a fear of baby terrorists, or babies smuggling drugs in their diapers, I don't know.
So whereas before it was sufficient to add James to his mother's passport, it is now necessary for him to have his own passport, even at three months old. That might not sound so bad, but the kicker is that he has to follow all the same new super-strict passport restrictions that adults now have to as well: no smiling, no hats or glasses, both eyes clearly open and both ears visible.
Getting such a picture of James was no easy matter.
On the positive side, since Emilie's mother and step-father both work at the prefecture, they at least had an inside track to getting to the passport service to present their documents. On the other hand, despite a whole day of trips back and forth to the photo booth, they could not get an acceptable picture. Here is the first attempt:
The problem here is the hand is visible holding him (he has to be held up because he can't sit up on his own yet). So a second attempt was made, holding him from behind:
This one is no good because the head has to fill up the frame of the picture, and he is too zoomed out! By this time a couple hours had gone by and so the baby fell asleep. He had to be woken up for the third picture, which he did not appreciate:
This one is no good, not because he's crying, but because his ear is cropped off on the edge of the picture! At that point they gave up, and went another day to the one professional photographer in town who was willing to do passport photos for infants. After all that we were finally able to get an acceptable photo, and James now has his very own passport:
Phew!
