Marissa’s parents left today, after a great week and a fun weekend at the beach. We visited Manuel Antonio National Park and enjoyed seeing monkeys, iguanas, cool birds, and various other wildlife. We also spent some time in the warm Pacific ocean, and then retired to the hotel pool. It was a lot of fun. Unfortunatly today, it was back to real life. After a long day of school, we packed up the girls and went into downtown to the registro civil to begin the process of making Analeigh an American. The first step of this process is getting a birth certificate, which normally takes six months. If you can’t wait that long (which of course we can’t) you have to request a “quick” birth certificate (in person) which normally takes 2-3 weeks. After finding the right office and waiting in line, we discovered that the registration person at the hospital, who told us that Analeigh could have two middle names instead of a duplicated last name (“Hess Hess”) was incorrect. As a result, the registro civil had combined her middle names to make “Analeigh Gracerose Hess Hess.” It has a beautiful ring to it, doesn’t it? The lady seemed to understand our desire to correct this, and began the name change process for us. All was going well until she asked to see our passports. We gave her our passport cards (which we always use) but she said she needed to see the originals. Sadly, our original passports are currently in the possession of the immagration office of Costa Rica, who are taking their time with our student visas. After a nice discussion, the friendly government lady informed us that we could actually get nothing done without our passports, but she would be glad to help us another day when we returned. So whenever immigration decides to return our passports, we will return downtown to begin the process (which now includes a name change) again. So after $9 in cab fare and 2 1/2 hours of our time, we have nothing to show for it.  In fact, we now have more work ahead of us than we did this morning.  For those of you keeping score at home, thats Costa Rica 1, Hess family 0. Stay tuned for the next episode of Fun with Bureaucracy! In the meantime, here are some pictures from this weekend…

Analeigh enjoyed her first trip to the beach, although we had no shortage of old people telling us that she was way too young to be there.

Here’s our family at the beach. Manuel Antonio is a gorgeous place!

Pappy enjoyed some time in the pool with Avalyn!

Nanny didn’t miss out either!

Analeigh caught up on some sleep during the three and a half hour bus ride home (with no A/C)