Happy Passport Day!

So, it turns out that today is National Passport Day. Not entirely sure what this means, but it made our lives a lot easier when it came to applying for Quinn's passport.

Children have to apply in person with their parents, and most passport acceptance facilities (most of which are post offices) have limited hours, Monday through Friday. I have concocted and abandoned more than one scheme for Quinn and me to meet Tim at a downtown post office at a convenient time so we can apply in person. The Passport Agency a block from Tim's work is usually appointment-only, reserved for people who are leaving the country in the next two weeks.

A few DC post offices do have Saturday hours, but it turned out that by the time we thought of it today, most of them were closed already. But, the D.C. Passport Agency downtown was open today for National Passport Day from 10-3, and we had over an hour left in that window. So, we hopped in the car and headed downtown, and had one of the most pleasant bureaucratic-processing experiences we've had.

We were greeted by a helpful person as soon as we walked in, we were called almost immediately after getting a number, they photocopied our IDs for us (the one thing we hadn't gotten to), Quinn got not one but TWO balloons, at least five people sporting Passport stickers wished us a cheerful goodbye on the way out, and we were in and out in about twenty minutes. It was awesome. Happy Passport Day, everybody!