Baptism Ideas for your Baby Born Abroad

Happy New Year!

After completing your "quest" to get a valid pass for child -- and you're Roman Catholic -- it's only natural that you arrange for your newborn to be baptised. For most Filipino Catholics here, you either have your child baptised where you are, or back to the Philippines where most of your relatives and friends are.

We went for the Philippine route. So anyway, if you're interested, here are some firsthand tips from us.

• Prepare the documents. Namely, the child's Birth Certificate and the parrent's Marriage Certificate. Prepare some photocopies as well. If you don't have this, you'll be in a whole lot of trouble.
• Contact your Church. You should have done this waaaay ahead of your target date of baptism --even way ahead of your flight back to Philippines. Ask for the requirements (i.e. above documents, seminar for parents and godparents, etc.), whether they offer "special" (i.e. solo) baptism or only mass baptism, available schedule, and what fees are required, if any. Most parishes have websites nowadays, so you should check them out online.
• Contact your local contact. To make things even easier for you, you need someone "onsite" -- could be a relative or a close friend -- to actually help smoothen things out even before you arrive. They should be able to help out arranging with the church/parish, talk with caterers, prepare your place, etc.
• Prepare the budget. Can't be stressed enough. A well-planned budget goes a long way. This will help you plan ahead with the event.
• Prepare the Guestlist. With the budget on hand, you should be able to make a list of the people you want to invite. Usually, this should always include your immediate family, close friends, and godparents. This is a bit trickier than what you may think. So plan ahead.
• Consider your luggage when booking a flight. Expecially if it's your baby's first-time to travel, you should consider the amount of luggage. You'd be surprised that the large bulk of your total check-in baggage is your kid's. So you may want to consider carefully before going for the cheaper airline's 15kg check-in limit or the more expensive one with a slightly more 20kg check-in.
• Pictures, Pictures, Pictures! If you're like us, you'd probably want to take pictures of your newborn everyday if you could. Save, collect, and collate. It may not seem much now, but you should organize the pictures before the total number is way too much to handle -- you'd be surprised that you may end up with hundreds of pictures in one month alone. Anyway, where are you going to use this pictures? Well, in case you have absolutely no idea, here are some hints for you:
• invitations
• sourvenirs
• tarpoulins
• guest book
• Hire some Help. Might be a bit costly and some may think even unnecessary. However, you need some people to take care of stuff -- food, pictures, video, whatever -- so that  you can have the time to concentrate on the things that are more important. You don't need to hire someone for everything, but you should consider hiring for the "big stuff" that you should not be worrying about like caterers and a photographer.
• DIY Stuff. There are some stuff that you can do yourself, provided, you have the time, energy, and resources. Example: for us, since we have photoshop, tons of pictures, and a decent printer, we did the invitations ourselves.

Guess that's it. There are still many other considerations but this list, based from our personal experience, tops them all off. Good luck! :)