Today Adam doubled his citizenship. It was an errand we’d been meaning to do for a long time now, but you know how errands get pushed back. Today was more or less a replay of our trip to Ljubljana back in March, during which he was declared Polish. Today this baby also got American.

It is not without ambivalence that we accomplished this task. Obviously, it would be foolish to deny a child the chance to be a citizen of a country to which he is entitled to be a citizen of (does this parse?), but lately neither of us have particularly felt that the U.S. has merited our infant’s endorsement. So we look to the future, specifically that future in which, for whatever reason, our son asks us, “why the hell didn’t you register me as a U.S. citizen?”

So, to forestall that one recriminatation of the legion we will no doubt hear in any case, we did.

Filling out the mountain of paperwork to obtain such a ruling was not a simple task, nor was it without comedy. We had had the packet since February, and the work of completing the forms over the last several days ranged from the comical (“honey, they want to know Adam’s occupation?” “Baby”; What’s his fax number?”) to the truly vexing if not impossible (list the day, month, year of every city you [the father] have ever lived in, domestic and foreign).

It appears that Poland and the U.S. are among the few countries, coincidentally, which continue to allow the dual-citizenship thing without making a lot of noise about it. I think that being able to claim the citizenship of both parents is a very fine thing, and wonder why more nations don’t follow the same line of thinking. I chafed greatly recently when a colleague of mine (Kansan) opined loudly that the U.S. should shut down the born-there = citizen policy. On some level, it bothers me that Adam’s having been born in Slovenia means exactly nothing to Slovenia.

Embassy Row was a mess when we got there. Both the U.S. and German embassies are making major changes to their security systems, so the entire block was cordoned off with rigid metal fencing that looked semi-permanent and a battalion of heavily riot-geared local police restricting pedestrian traffic. I love Ljubljana as a city, but negotiating the center and parking is daunting under the best of circumstances and this didn’t help. Still, the whole thing went smoothly, as did our corollary errand, which was getting Magda a visitor’s visa for our forecast summer trip to the New World. In fact, her visa required just a few hours’ wait, so we killed time wandering around LJ on an almost painfully beautiful late-spring day. Faux-Mexican food, ice cream, skirt shopping, and so on to make a nice day out in spite of the bureaucracy.

The results of this admittedly major excursion arrived in the dappled shade of a beer garden across from the U.S. embassy: Magda appeared with no notable delay bearing a Consular Record of Birth for the boy (“under the provisions of Section 2705 of Title 22…is proof of citizenship”) and her own visa for our U.S. visit. Total damage: perhaps 20 hours and $272. Well worth it.