Time Magazine’s Work in Progress is one of the blogs I read regularly. Lisa Takeuchi Cullen writes about the workplace and right now she’s using her platform to document her role as a new mom.

There are a few other workplace blogs that I lurve, as Katie likes to say, like Marci Alboher’s Shifting Careerson nytimes.com and the Wall Street Journal’s The Juggle,but Ms. Takeuchi Cullen’s blog is probably my favorite.

Anyway, her post today really hit home for me. It details the nightmare of certificates and forms I will one day face if we want our kids to have U.S.-Japanese citizenship. So far I have been lucky when dealing with Japan’s bureaucracy. My mom helped me get an international driver’s license 10 years ago, and both she and my dad completed the forms for my Japanese passport renewal this past spring.

There is no worse feeling in life than getting to the counter after a long wait on line and having the person behind the glass tell you that you are missing a form, or a signature, or completed something incorrectly. Doesn’t matter if it’s the post office, the DMV or the Social Security office. If I want to avoid this frustration with the Japanese consulate, I better start working on those citizenship forms now.