Our daughter was born in Chiang Mai on a Friday afternoon, and by Monday we were already arguing over which surname would go on each of her two passports.

I'm Canadian, 34, and my wife Nam, 31, gave birth to our daughter Mali at a hospital in Chiang Mai on a Friday afternoon. Between the sleep deprivation and the joy of those first days, neither of us had properly looked into what paperwork lay ahead to get Mali, as we wanted, both her mother's Thai nationality and my Canadian one.

Nam handled the Thai side: registering the birth at the local amphoe had to happen within a fairly tight window, and without that Thai certificate in order, none of the following steps, neither Mali's Thai passport nor the Canadian consular registration, could move forward.

The Canadian side turned out more complicated than I expected. Registering the birth abroad (in my case, applying for proof of Mali's Canadian citizenship) required documents we didn't have ready yet: my own original birth certificate, which had stayed at my parents' place in Canada, and a certified translation of Mali's Thai birth certificate.

I spent several nights, with Mali asleep on my chest, emailing my parents to scan and send documents, and hunting down a certified translator in Chiang Mai who could produce the translation as quickly as we needed.

What worried us most, once we'd calmly worked through the information, was confirming that Mali would need to travel with us to Canada at some point, which meant that Canadian passport, with all the supporting paperwork in order, wasn't an optional errand we could just push down the road.

We ended up completing the Thai civil registration on time, without complications, mostly thanks to Nam's family already knowing the local process well. The Canadian process took nearly three months to fully resolve, between document submissions, an in-person appointment at the consulate in Chiang Mai, and the final wait for the passport by mail.

Mali now has two passports kept in a folder Nam checks every few months to track the renewal dates. What we learned from the whole process is that no nationality paperwork sorts itself out, and it's worth looking into the exact deadlines well before the baby arrives, not after.