A String of Bad Luck....

Many of you know what kind of luck Alec and I have been having lately. Well...it looks like we might be seeing the sunshine soon. For the last two weeks, I have been on the phone with the Passport Agency Call Center trying to get Maddison's passport for our trip to England on Friday the 27th. We sent the application off in the beginning of February. I think she was only 10 days old when we took her picture and sent off the application. The govt deposited my check on March 8th. So where was her passport??

I decided that I needed to call and find out what was taking soo long. Our travel date was coming up and we couldn't afford to reschedule our tickets. The govt has it set up to where you can only speak to someone if you are traveling within 2 weeks. Kind of scary if you ask me. I don't like to wait for the last minute to figure out my plans at all. I called 2 or 3 times a day for two weeks. The only answers I ever got were, "Ma'am, the application is being processed. You still have plenty of time to get the passport before you leave." Finally on Wednesday the 18th, someone told me that there was a problem with her birth certificate and asked if i had received a letter in the mail. I told the woman there I had received no letter and this was the first time I had heard of there being a problem. I couldn't imagine what problem there could be. I asked to speak to a supervisor. The supervisor apologized for the agent and told me that there was no problem to hold up the application process and then suggested making an appt for the New Orleans office on Monday the 23rd just in case I had not received the passport. I took her advice and made the appt. I also got a little worried about the birth certificate and went to the Health Department with Jessica on Friday to get another copy of the birth certificate, just in case.

On Saturday, after calling and calling and calling, I was finally told that her passport had NOT been shipped out and that there WAS a problem with the birth certificate, or lack thereof. (apparently, someone had misplaced the cert.) And that we WOULD have to travel to New Orleans on Sunday for an 8am appt Monday morning. I got home that night and found a hotel online and starting packing our bags for the trip. Needless, to say Alec and I were NOT looking forward to such a long drive with a 3 month old. But Maddie surprised us as always. She was a perfect angel!!!

We got into New Orleans late Sunday night. Found out that I had booked a room with the Iberville Suites (which happens to be the Ritz)two streets from Bourbon Street. We had to use the valet service because we didn't know where to park and didn't want to tote all the STUFF around the city. We got upstairs to check in and they did NOT have our reservations. The booking number that I had wasn't in the system and I couldn't remember which website I had used to make the reservations. Could it get any worse? I had reserved a room for $125. The usual rates were $250 per night!!!What were we going to do? It was too late to go and find another room.

I called Jessica for HELP!!! She got online and looked at the website and couldn't find the info for us. Then she checked Alec's email and got the confirmation email and faxed it to the front desk. WHAT AN ANGEL!!! I don't know what I would do with her!!!

We got up yesterday morning and went down to the Passport office waited for 2 hours and then were told to come back at 1130 am to pick up her passport!! HOORAY!!! We were finally going to have her passport in our hands. We walked around the city to pass the time and see the sites. I don't think Maddison was too impressed with what she saw because she took a nap in her stroller!! We FINALLY picked up the passport and headed to the hotel to feed Maddison and got ready to leave. I really thought that things were starting to look up! WRONG!! We got the valet guy to get our car ready and loaded everything up. He asked us if we knew where we were going and we said yes, but asked if he knew a better way. WHAT A STUPID IDEA!! He told us a "short cut" that ended up taking us 1 1/2 hours out of our way and another phone to Jessica to help us get out of the mess the valet guy got us in. Finally, we got home last night at 8pm. We are all tired and exhausted, but it was all worth it! Because Friday we are getting on a plane and heading to ENGLAND!!! Sorry for such a long blog. But I had to get it off my chest and share our string of bad luck with others!!!