Spanish Consulate, zoo, and the police (I couldn’t think of a snappy title that pulled it all together)

Have you heard of Ley de Memoria Histórica (the Law of Historical Memory)? Well I hadn’t either. Until, that is, my cousin emailed me about it. Basically it’s a temporary Spanish law that allows grandchildren of Spanish citizens to recover their Spanish citizenship without a residency requirement. Well shoot, who wouldn’t want dual citizenship – that could come in handy in so many ways. So la familia and I trooped to the quaint Spanish Consulate in San Francisco and I filled out the required form. (Most of the following are cell phone pics, by the way.)

Nice! The appointment was granted for the end of June, so we’ll see if I get to be the latest citizen of the U.S. and the EU (European Union). It would be kind of ironic if *I* was the one in the family with dual citizenship seeing as how the girls were born in China and TubaDad spends more time working in international countries than anyone else I know.

Anyhow, after the consulate, it was a purdy blue-sky day in the city, so we looked around and decided to go to the zoo. What a beautiful day with the animals. The bonus was that the zoo was all decked out for the holidays, so we got to go ice skating (on plastic ice) and see Santa’s reindeer.

The girls saw their favorite peacock and talked to him (her?) as they always do and even followed him around for awhile.

Then we had a nice dinner and headed home.

That’s when the day kind of went to crap. We were in heavy traffic on the freeway when someone bashed us from behind. Scared me to death – I heard the brakes squealing for what seemed like a minute (although it must have been just seconds) before the crash. We slowly moved over to the shoulder to find that she didn’t have registration or insurance with her and someone had also hit her from behind and had taken off. Lovely... Called the cops and were told to sit tight – on that scary shoulder in the dark with cars whizzing by, ugh!!! That was definitely the worst part for me. We waited for about 20 minutes, then took care of everything with the police and drove home.

We are all ok, the girls are fine, we have new car seats, and the van is in the repair shop until the end of next week. I have to say that I blessed that huge tank-like minivan and those massive, bulky five-point carseats we have the girls in. We are uber-protected in that rig even if it gets a little crumpled. Anyhow, we’re driving a rental SUV that is quite sporty, but has doors that swing out (how do you do that with kids?) and I CANNOT WAIT until we have our minivan back! If you had told me 10 years ago that those words would cross my lips I would never, ever have believed you...

Have a wonderful Christmas eve tomorrow, and always wear those seatbelts. I know, I’m always preaching about seatbelts, but they really are invaluable. Remember TubaDad’s taxi accident? (I’m including that link because I had forgotten all about the EMT story at the end and it made me smile.)