Lent Day 20: The Things You Learn About Yourself

 Just woke up the boy. Called through the bedroom door, “You are 6 feet, right?”

Tired boy, awake but not ready to join civilization, “Ymnf.”

“Need to know for your passport application.”

He is. Minus one inch for E (they just went back-to-back last night), and the two littles are a mystery.  We’ll have to measure.

[I am, meanwhile, praying the youngest gets tall enough before our trip to no longer require a booster seat in Switzerland.  One less hassle.  So if that prayer is answered, she may be traveling on an already-outdated passport.  All kids do, one hopes.]

Held my breath and put down “brown” for E’s hair color — I can never decide if it’s dark blonde or light brown.  Put down blonde for myself, which it is, mostly, but with the amused awareness that it’ll no longer be that by the time the new passport expires.  My eye color was debated for years — blue or green? — but at 15 standing in the passport office we all agreed on grey with a yellow circle around the iris pupil, hence the confusion.  Grey they are still.  Also I’ve grown half an inch (taller) since my last passport, I know because last fall when we were measuring kids we measured me too.

Thankfully the State Department knows better than to ask your weight.

Oh, you wanted to talk about Lent? Scott Reeves has you covered, as usual.  Self-examination of the deeper sort.

Passport application from 1922.

Scanned passport application, circa 1922. US passport office (US passport office) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons. Click through on the Wikimedia link to see whose it was. Ha!