USA, USA!

Yesterday, Carlos had his citizenship ceremony and he is now (FINALLY) a US citizen! It's been a long process, but all of our hard work has come to fruition and he can now get a US passport. We started the paperwork for Carlos' citizenship back in 2010 (around the time we were both defending our Ph.D. dissertations in Miami) and after all of that, the next big step was our joint interview a little while after we moved to DC. From there, you have to wait at least 2 years before you can apply for citizenship and renew your green card. After waiting, more paperwork, and more fees, Carlos took his citizenship test, received his invitation for the oath ceremony about 5 months later, and everything culminated in yesterday's event at the DC courthouse!

The ceremony was pretty short (a little under an hour), but we arrived at the court house ~8 am to check in. The ceremony started at 10 am and we left at 11 am. We walked to Zaytinya for a celebratory lunch and that was that!

The next step is to get Carlos' passport so that we can travel to Costa Rica at the end of this month. We have a lot of fun in store over the next couple of months: Mom and Dad will visit us in DC from 15-20 April (we might even still have cherry blossoms!), Carlos and I plan to travel to Costa Rica for 2-3 weeks, leaving DC around 29 April, then visiting Mexico for 2 weeks at the end of May to find a place to live, process residency paperwork, and teach on a field course in Los Tuxtlas. This time of year always gets exceedingly busy!