Since Adith pretty much dictates my life these days, I changed the color and template of this blog to a shiny baby blue :). Hope you all dont object.
It has been a fleeting three weeks since Adith's birth and I have not found the time to document these past few weeks. I am back at work this week. Isnt it a cruel world where the mother gets 6 months maternity leave and the dad gets one measly week. Anyway, I managed to go to work one day and then worked from home the next four days. This in order to ease the transition for the family is what I told my manager. But it was really to ease my transition to the daily grind :).
Adith received his SSN today and this meant that we could apply for his passport. 2 passport size pictures, application form and Adith's birth certificate are all that are required. We drag the baby to the local Kinkos only to find out that they dont take passport pics of babies - too hard they say!! Take the baby to a professional studio was the recommended advice. It is bad enough that one has to pay something like $20 for a couple of passport size photos - going to a studio is likely to cost much much more. How can these guys get away with charging us these big bucks for a couple of snaps? They dont give us the negatives since these are digital pictures anyway (and they dont give you the JPEG file either). The bane of the free market economy is that one can charge what ever he/she wants as long as there is still a demand for the product - is there no sense of morality in businesses these days?. I hope that with the advent of cheap digital cameras and digital printers, more and more people will make their own passport size photos and put an end to this daylight robbery (okay - i am done with my rant on passport size photos).
Long story short, I made my own passport size photo of Adith. Oh, before I forget, the passport photo instructions mention that the distance from the chin to the top of the head must be between 1 inch and 1 & 3/8 inch. What they mean to say is that the distance from the chin to the top of the head must be between 2.5 cm and 3.5 cm (now isnt that something you can measure using a normal ruler :)). Score 1 for the metric system.
Comments
Agree 100%, for tech savvy people it does feel being ripped off when you pay so much $$ when you could possibly do it your self at home. I have printed fairly good passport pictures using the tutorial below.
Enjoy !!
Arindam.
http://www.dpchallenge.com/tutorial.php?TUTORIAL_ID=22
Followed the link to your blog from your email :)
You too can get looong paternitry leave if you can survive labor pains ;) Try it next time :D
BTW, for most folk here 6 months maternity leave is almost unheard of (You have to be really lucky to get that kind of a leave...umm, why do I think I know one lucky Mom??). US is known to have the worst maternity benefits amongst the developed countries. Other developed countires provide 1-3 years of job protected leaves for new moms!
BTW, loved reading thru your blog...will definately keep coming back!
Divya
P.S. Good job on the passport pic. Did they accept it?
P.P.S. Loved the innocence on Adith's face!!