Run for the border

We all have it pretty easy at the moment. Now, with 17 weeks of pregnancy gone, kidlet has easy passage to wherever she goes.

Free to cross borders at will, so long as the grump with a bump doesn't offend any immigration officials.

This liberty will be short lived. In 23 weeks or so, our spawn will be born unto the world, into a country it is not a citizen of.

Current citizenship laws of Ireland and the Netherlands are in tandem, and place of birth does not automatically qualify you for citizenship, parentage does. Therefore, when the wife squatter makes its appearance on the Dutch landscape, it will be an Irish citizen by default.

All nice and dandy.

Except when we want to leave the country. With Holland being marginally bigger in area than a Tesco's car park, leaving the country is not uncommon.

Up until 2005, Irish children could travel under the passport of their parents, but since then they are required to have their own.

In short, if we want to take the fruit of my loins, laboratory mix-ups aside, back home for a weekend, they need a passport. Should we need to get to Ireland in an emergency any time from next February onwards, the kid needs a passport.

This includes a passport photograph.

How do you take a passport photograph of someone who can't hold up their own head? Sellotape?

How do you specify eye colour on the legal travel documentation of someone who even if they did keep their eyes open long enough for you to check, you'd see they don't have any bloody colour?

How does an immigration official compare the actual appearance of a 1 year old with their passport photograph taken as a 3 week old while still coughing up bits of umbilical cord?

Do ultrasound pictures come in passport size?

Secrets - Part Two

The pedantic among you will say this is more of a tip than a secret, I know this because my own nature is causing a civil conflict between the pedants and the mockers living in my brain.

Regardless of the inner turmoil and my fear of promoting miss-categorisation, this tip shall be deemed a secret.

Simply put, don't laugh at her. Ever.

You may well find it amusing that she is sobbing into her pizza over Grey's Anatomy, which incidentally is being shown 5 days a week with back to back episodes. Thank you NET5 for that. Bastards.

But don't laugh.

You may even find it hilarious when the grump with a bump is sitting distraught on the side of the bed in her underwear, having tried on and discarded both her normal clothes which are too small now, and her maternity clothes which are still a bit too big.

Don't laugh.

You may almost run the car off the motorway from shaking with stifled laughter when she phones you on your way to work in floods of tears because she can't find her shoes.

Don't laugh.

She knows how to grow new arseholes, so will quite happily tear you a new one.

No walk in the park

Last weekend we went to 'Baby Dump'.

The name? Don't ask, I don't know.

While it sounds like the setting for a Stephen King novel, or some sort of shrine to infant excrement, it is simply a baby goods store.

The kind of place that would have made our faces explode just 4 months ago, it still felt more than uneasy walking around there, but we had a scouting mission to complete.

Eye opening, to say the least.

Did you know that you must have 154 different types of baby seat/bassinette to attach to a stroller?

You need one kind to carry the kid to the car, another for in the car, another to remove him from the car, another to bring him back in home, another to rock him to sleep in, another to have him actually sleep in, another for Tuesdays, another if you need to go to the supermarket, and another if you plan on coming home again.

All of these need different adapters to connect to the one Über stroller that you will have remortgaged your house to buy.

You didn't know that? Idiot.

Each of these seats come with their own colour coded set of accessories too. Rain covers, sleet covers, snow covers, fog lamps, alloys, bear traps, fire extinguishers, and flick knives.

All available in midnight magenta and sea-surf blue, all essential enough to make not having them akin to child abuse, and all costing a day's wages.

Then you have the mini sleeping bags because blankets are just so passé, and you never know when your stroll in the park could turn into a trek across the arctic circle.

We left with half a dozen brochures and no idea about what we might need or not need.

What the grump-with-a-bump and I did learn is that transporting nuclear waste is less complicated and expensive than taking a baby to the post office.