Passport Application - AKA Airplane Practice

Part 2 of obtaining your childrens' passports is the application process.  Here's how we seamlessly pulled that one off:

Step 17: Spend an evening at home filling out the applications online so they'll be all neat and pretty, and hopefully speed the process along.  All necessary information and documents (height, social security numbers, birth certificates) will be in separate rooms of the house.  Obviously.

Step 18: Pick up the hubs for a lunch date with the kids prior to heading to the Post Office to apply for the passports.  (You're such an awesome planner-aheader.  Pat yourself on the back.)

Step 19: Review the pretty printed applications on the way to lunch and realize that information is incorrect on 2 of the 3 applications.  You're batting .333 on your childrens' personal information.  (Unpat yourself on the back.)

Step 20: Brush it off.  Head to lunch and the Post Office anyway.  Madly (but neatly...and correctly) fill out 2 forms by hand at the Post Office while hubby wrangles 3 kiddos in line to start the application process.  Get to the last few lines of the second application (prepare back re-patting) before hubby reports that he had to make an appointment to apply for the passports tomorrow.  They would have done 1 passport application on the spot, but not 3.  (Take hand prepped for back patting and apply once, firmly, to forehead.)

Step 21: Reprint 2 erroneous passport applications (you can try for neat, pretty and speedy again), repick-up the hubs, relunch-date with the kids, reshow-up at the Post Office.

Step 22: Sit in a very small office with 3 bored ill-advisedly self-entertaining children while the very nice man (Joe, really he was awesome enough that I remember his name.) stamps, shuffles, staples and who-knows-what with all the papers necessary for three mini passports.  Simultaneously act as a jungle gym/disciplinarian/apologist/check-writer.

Step 23: When it's all said and done, leave the office with a sigh of relief.  Then slowly realize the terrifying fact that you're worn out after 20 minutes of trying to get your small herd to sit still in a small place, in order to get the necessary documentation so that you can board a plane with said herd for a trans-Atlantic flight.  My husband summed it up best: This is why people have tablets.

Step 24: Add "buy a tablet" to your To Do list.