It’s been almost a year, an entire year since the day Layton was born….can’t believe that time actually can go that fast. I think about what has happened in the last year, or even the last couple of years leading up to our surrogacy and life has changed more than I could have ever imagined.
I haven’t written in a while on the blog, since we have been dedicating our entire lives to enjoying raising little Layton, he has grown so much and getting stronger and bigger every day. The house is filled with his laughter, and him trying to talk and yell commands at us as though he fully understands he has his dad’s under his little finger that we jump as soon as he speaks….but we would have nothing different, and loving every little minute of it.
We are planning Layton’s first birthday party, next month he is 1 years old. Crazy to think he is already 1. He has started taking steps on his own and soon will be running around without holding his daddies fingers.
This past year has been an amazing learning for us, to see your child grow and learn, and develop skills so quickly is heartwarming to see, I can’t even imagine what the next year will bring….
Though this year has been amazing, we are still going through frustrations with citizenship and immigration. You would think this process shouldn’t be too difficult since we have done several DNA tests and all forms and applications have been submitted and received for over 9 months now. Layton is clearly Canadian, born from Canadian DNA and this can’t be argued. But for some reason un-explained to us this is not a normal proof of citizenship, and because not normal we were just informed that the normal 7 month processing time has been extended to 25 months. Yes over 2 years! No one will argue and deny that he is Canadian, but proving a Canadian is a Canadian is more difficult than granting a non-Canadian Canadian citizenship. Funny how our government works. Not only is Layton not a citizen of anywhere in the world, no one has the will to take ownership of giving us a proper answer as to why this is actually taking so long.
I have sent several emails to the CIC (Canadian Immigrations and Citizenship) and the last email I receive back graciously apologized for the delay, went through two paragraphs of the history of DNA sampling, then gave me a link to check on my expected timeline as should have to wait for paperwork for be processed. This link stated that it should be no longer than 5 months……we are already on the over 9 month mark and still waiting.
I took the advice of some friends and made an appointment with my member of parliament who at the time happened to be the minister of citizenship and immigration. I thought this would be the next best step in getting some answers. This meeting happened this week. Like always everyone was nice enough and said they would do their best in finding out some information, and made sure we knew they couldn’t expedite anything but hopefully could find out some answers on our behalf, only after making a joke about promising not to call immigration to have our son deported. (Which I did not find funny in the least)
2 days later the phone call came from the MP’s office that they had some information for us; our case is “very different”, “breaking new grounds”. “It’s a new landscape” after the certain buzz words were told that it should take 25 months for paper work to be processed…25 months? So this is where we sit as of today. A Canadian son who is a Canadian citizen but Canada won’t send proof that he is a citizen. I don’t know what makes sense anymore.
Daniel and I are grateful that he is with us, his is not being impacted by this but for us it’s an uneasiness that we can’t just move forward and close this file finally. We can’t get him a passport, enroll him in school, or get a social insurance number yet…these are all things that most people take for granted. That we are in a holding pattern once again for…….
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