The Rosas-Standring Family

Today Ruben and I headed off to Playa del Carmen to tend to some important business. We grabbed the babies, our Burger King coupon (a gift with his paycheck from work)- although a little strange because there is no Burger King, or any fast food chain here (except for Subway & 7-11) But that was fine for us. Any excuse to eat at Burger King was good for us. I was really excited about our business today but Ruben seemed to think of it much more casually.

I reminded him that our babies were about to officially become Mexican Citizens. That is a special thing. Ruben is a man with an incredible amount of pride. And pride for being a "son of Mexico" as he has said often, has always been something that has made him so sexy to me. I do not think that he had even thought about it that way. I mean, it is really just a form of paperwork to get the immigration for the kids taken care of but still.

I do not know the specific rules, but from the research that we did and the people we talked to, this is what we had to do for the kids immigration...
1) we had to get long form copies of each birth certificate. (we found it handy to get a couple copies while at the office of records, just in case) We also got my long form birth certificate and marriage license.

2) these docs also need to be Apostilled. This is the part that I think a lot of people do not do because most people here assumed that we had not done that. This can only be done by the United State at the state office where ever the event took place. The Apostle is, in essence, an international notary. It certifies the validity of the signature on the document. This cannot be done by a normal notary in the USA. It was not expensive or difficult to do it, once I knew what it was. In Oregon we simply drove to Salem, into in the office and away the stamp flew.

In the case of the kids- they were born in San Francisco, so I was lucky that there is an office in SF that can do the apostile. I am sure that this is true for major cities. Anyway. When I was in SF the office told me that I needed to go and get a stamp that certified the validity of the Health Inspector on the birth certificate. - It is memories like these that remind me that the USA is just as red taped and tough as Mexico, we just bitch about it here more. This was now a 3 page document to prove that my kids where born in SF, to Ruben and myself.

3) The next thing we did was fly to Mexico, get stamped on our passport, which gave us 180 days to get stuff done.

4) When we got here we were told that we needed to translate the docs to Spanish. That really did not surprise us but I was sort of tired of hoops by this point. And of course, it had to be a certified translator. Again, expected, but still. I asked around some blogging friends of mine and they came through with flying colors. They directed me towards a website (www.cancuncare.com) I have really enjoyed looking around that site. Anyway. We got the numbers for some certified translators and found a good price in Playa. ** we tried to get this done at one point in the USA and could not-- we could find no one. ***

5) Once the docs were done we took them over to the office of Registro Civil. This office was on Benito Juarez and 45th in Playa del Carmen. We paid the fees, around 800 pesos per kid and their birth certificate were created.

Like I said... a bunch of hoops and really just paper work but I think that it is very cool that my kids are now so much more a part of this country and this culture. More and more every day they are falling in love with it here. The language is the next big focus.


After all of this was done and the kids were officially citizens we headed off for a very special treat. One of the things that I love about Tulum is that is so local. Their are no HUGE chains or overly Americanized... well everything. And I love that. But some times you miss the simple things back home. I was never a huge Burger King fan but a) we had a coupon and it was a good one. and b)It has been a long time since we had a good (remind me of home) burger. The kids were very excited as usual.

After lunch we only had about an hour to spend with Ruben on the beach. It was a nice hour, but way too short. We had a nice time playing and collecting sea shells. And Akilean tried to celebrate a little too much. :)


It was a fun day and I am so happy that my kids are now citizens of this amazing country. I cannot wait until my citizenship journey has ended.