Naturalization Ceremony

Zeke had his Naturalization Ceremony back on August 26th. It was pretty amazing how fast and easy the whole process was, especially compared to becoming a permanent resident. The ceremony was held in the Landmark Center in St Paul. I think there were almost 200 that participated in the ceremony. The neatest part I thought was when they recognized the different countries where everyone was originally from. Zeke of course was the only one from Uruguay and the largest group of course was from Somalia with almost 50 (Minnesota has a large population from Somalia, the largest outside of the country itself). After the ceremony, I was attempting to take a picture of the three of us, when a guy offered to take the picture for us. It turned out he was a reporter from Minnesota Public Radio so we talked to him a little bit, he took a picture with his nice camera and we showed up in their story on their website (picture number 7): http://minnesota.publicradio.org/collections/special/columns/news_cut/archive/2010/08/a_thousand_words_the_naturaliz.shtml The only kind of sad part is it seems like we only have one son. We decided to get a babysitter for Lucas and Matias since it was going to be a pretty long morning. We did tell the reporter that we had two more kids, but since it was just a picture of the three of us, he just mentioned Nicolas (click on captions to see what he wrote). Here are the pictures that I took:

waiting for the ceremony to begin - everyone was given a little American Flag in their packet

can you see Zeke? he's sitting next to an Egyptian Coptic Priest who was also featured on Minnesota Public Radio's photo blog at: http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2010/08/26/naturalization-ceremony/

the building was beautiful - it used to be one of the main courthouses about 50 years ago

Zeke is now an American!

this is the picture that Tim Nelson (the reporter) took for us

the Landmark Center

Later that day, I got a better video of Nicolas crawling. He's even better at it now (the video was taken a month ago) and his favorite thing to do is climb up stairs! At home I keep the gate up but at the playground, it's almost impossible to keep him away. The password is "nicolas"

Nicolas crawling from Kendra Hernandez on Vimeo.