Two years ago my husband and I went to California to see his cousin graduate from marine academy. We had a great time, we went everywhere. We had just had our son five months before and since we didn’t trust to leave him at home with anybody he got to go with us. His name is Cj and he is now 3 years old- someday we will tell him this story. Anyways, we ended up spending the day with my husbands cousin Shawna and her husband David, they decided that they wanted to go to Tijuana to get some tiquila with the the worm in the bottle. I thought it would be fun to cross the border and my husband didn’t object. So off we go, we rode the trolley down to the border stop. I started realizing that I hadnt brought any birth certificates or passports with me. My husband, not wanting to go back to the hotel and miss the opportunity to go to Mexico, finds the closest border patrol agent and asked if we could get back through to the U.S. if we just had social security cards. Lesson number one, don’t ever ask anything important to a border patrol agent who is on break. The Border patrol agent said, “ Yeah, that’s no problem.” And walked away. My husband tends to revert to a two year old when excited so I had to deal with him hopping and jumping, all excitably, across the border (oh yes, good times). We walked around Tijuana for about 4 hours, going through all the shops and buying random stuff. You have to love it when the only english speaking person down there is running a hole in the wall jewelry shop and is over pricing everything. The shop owner was dressed in a really nice suit and had a Bluetooth set in his ear, completely random thought but was funny at the time. My husband ended up buying me a really nice bracelet that was about two times over priced but none- the- less pretty.After we had our little adventure with shopping we decided that it was time to head back( Shawna and David never did find their tequila with the worm inside). We walked up to where people were crossing back into the U.S. and stood in a line that was atleast a mile long and inching forward. That was the longest wait, especially when you have a screaming baby with you.
Finally we made it into the area where people were showing their id's and having their belongings looked through and for some reason I got a sinking feeling in my stomach. Lesson number two, always trust your gut instinct the first time around. We made our way up the border patrol agent and handed him our social security cards. First thing out of his mouth was “ Are you stupid, don’t you watch television and know that you need a birth certificate to get through?” We stood their trying to tell him that a border patrol agent had said that it would be okay if we just had ours cards so we didn’t think we would have a problem. The agent just kept calling us stupid and saying that we couldn’t go back in the united states without proper identification. We told him that their was no way we could get it since we lived in Missouri and was just visiting. This is where it got really interesting, He starts to say that we bought our son from a family in Mexico, yes, our pure- as-the-driven-snow son! That’s where I decided to say” Hey I will show you the stretch marks if you don’t want to believe that he’s mine!” My husband’s cousin was right behind us and just started laughing, which of course, irritated the agent even more so he starts yelling at us saying that he wouldn’t expect to be let into our country without proper identification ( I guess he realized how stupid he looked when he made that comment about our son so he just dropped that subject). After 45 minutes of being yelled at and having my husband almost get arrested for yelling at the border patrol, the dumby agent finally realizes that it was a lost cause seeing how we all looked American and obliviously was tourists. I will never forget that day- especially the part about supposedly buying our baby across borders.
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