purenightshade

The last few months--really, since October--have been once never ending struggle. Today, it finally ended.

For nearly 2 years now, my town's community Travel Club has been planning a trip to Germany. It's a bit more involved than that, but that's the general idea. My daughter and I will be gone for, all said and done, 14 days. This includes having to go down the day before our flight and staying at my parent's place the night I get back, coming home the following day.

I haven't had a valid passport in years and hers expired not long after we came back to Canada from Japan. So I began the process of applying for our passports last fall. The applications were received by the passport office in October. We were shortly informed that her citizenship card wasn't sufficient, that she needed a long form birth certificate. She was born in Japan, so this was going to be a problem. Her card should have been sufficient, but the rules changed a few years ago. Ironically, if she was a year older she wouldn't need it.

The Japanese Consulate in Regina couldn't help me and neither could the one in Calgary. I had to, therefore, get in touch with the city hall in Kiryuu, where she was born. It took some time to get that process dealt with, but I finally got that document in January. The translation didn't take very long after that. 

Last Monday, Aislyn and I took the last documents down to the passport office in Saskatoon to get things finalized. A few days later I called to make sure they'd gotten to where they needed to go. I was promptly told that both passports were approved. Mine had been printed and hers was on its way to being printed.

Today, they arrived in the mail.

Finally.