Passport Fail

A funny thing happened on the way to the passport office...

Prologue: July 30, 2011
My wife and I took babygirl to Wal-Mart to get her photo taken for her passport. If you've recently gone through the process of getting a passport photo, you know that getting a photo is easy. You also know that getting a usable passport photo is about as easy as sitting for a portrait by a Renaissance artist. And that's for an adult.

As it was, we spent 45 minutes trying to get the kid to avoid smiling—something she already knows she's expected to do when someone's pointing a camera at her. We ended up feeding her popcorn twists between shots so she'd keep her mouth closed.

With that battle won, all we had to do was

• get her to sit still on the stool (which we did by kneeling in front of her just below camera view and holding her in place)
• keep her head straight up (instead of leaning to one side like a quizzical dog, a pose she struck all too often)
• keep her looking right at the camera (which we did in classic parental style, snapping fingers, shaking toys and cajoling from behind the photographer)
• distract her attention from what was right beside her: a giant red build-your-own-stuffed-toy machine that looked like a loaner from Willy Wonka's factory
• keep her from freaking out over the unstuffed toy animals hanging on the opposite wall like prisoners in a dungeon (OK, that one was more about me than the kid)

After what seemed like 200 shots, we managed to get one the photographer thought might survive the scrutiny of the humourless clerks at the passport office. Might. But that was good enough for us, so off we went.

Flash forward: Yesterday
My wife took babygirl downtown early in the morning to hand in the paperwork, along with those hard-won images. The clerk took a look, scribbled something on a sheet and handed it to my wife. It may as well have been a big red stamp that said REJECTED.

The sheet was a checklist of 32 ways passport photos can be unacceptable. As it turns out, the clerk still needed the "Other" category to explain why Emilie's likeness didn't make the cut. Her pink shirt looked white against the white background, thus obscuring her "shoulder line." Oh, and there was a bit of glare on her forehead. Because nothing says "National Security Risk" like a 13-month-old toddler with a shiny forehead!

To my wife's credit, she didn't take the sarcastic route. Instead, she calmly took the kid over to the photo place in the same building and got the new picture taken. It took all of six seconds to get a good shot. When she noticed that babygirl's mouth was open, the photographer said, "Oh, that's no problem. She's only a year old. They don't worry about that!"