officially starting the immigration process

A bit of background...

I am a US citizen by birth. DH (dear husband) is a New Zealand citizen by birth. We met 11 years ago in NZ. He followed me to America and we were married 10 years ago. He became a US permanent resident. 4 years ago we had DD (dainty daughter) #1. 2.5 years ago DH applied for US citizenship. It immediately got tied up in background check hell. 18 months ago DD2 was born.

We had always said we wanted to return to New Zealand to settle down. It was always "in a few years". Last year, we decided no more mucking about and putting it off, we were definitely going to move back to New Zealand. Two things needed to be completed first. I had started taking night classes towards a Masters degree, and I wanted to complete it. And we wanted DH to get his US citizenship, so that if we changed our minds and wanted to come back to the US we could, without having to apply for permanent residency all over again. And yes, though the US says that they consider naturalized citizens as being citizens of only the US, they don't make you renounce your original citizenship. And New Zealand has no problem with dual citizenship. He does not lose New Zealand citizenship by becoming a citizen of the US.

Well, finally, 2 weeks ago he became a naturalized US citizen. I'm on track to finish my degree in the Spring semester of 2008. We'll take the US summer 2008 to pack up, finalize stuff here, and hopefully do some Northern Hemisphere traveling. Our target date for arrival in New Zealand as residents is September 2008.

I was planning on applying for residency for me and the girls, but realized that they are New Zealand citizens by descent, and if I register them as such, they can get NZ passports and everything, and therefore would not need to apply for residency. So that leaves only me. Shouldn't be a problem.

So our first official step - register the girls' NZ citizenship by descent. For that they need 2 passport photos. While DD1 was at her last day of preschool this morning, I took DD2 to Walgreens to get the photos done. But she was tired, and got totally freaked out by the pimply teenager who got all close with the camera, and she started wailing. There was no calming her down with him near, so we'll just have to officially start tomorrow. :) Hopefully if she watches DD1 get hers done well, she'll be okay with it. Then we can send the applications off!

Come along this ride with us. It might be fun.