An Officially Named Baby

We went to register our Little Monkey last week. For a bureaucratic process, it was strangely lacking in bureaucracy. We just turned up with a baby, told the registrar everyone’s name and date of birth, and that was more-or-less it; he didn’t need to see any documentation or anything. The birth certificate looks reassuringly official, and the design doesn’t seem to have changed since mine was issued.

There’s a nice quote by Desmond Tutu on the importance of registering births (via the Wikipedia page on birth certificates): “…it’s a small paper but it actually establishes who you are and gives access to the rights and the privileges, and the obligations, of citizenship”.