What we're up to

Gosh, you have no idea how it bums me out that I haven't been snapping away behind my camera much since my photography class ended last week.  As I look through all the photos I've taken this summer, I'm proud of myself for stepping out of my comfort zone.  The class was the push I needed to try different things.  And I'm pleased as punch.

I soooo wish I had the time to get out there and continue shooting, but I've been bitten by the packing-up-your-house bug. It's amazing how many boxes we have already filled and placed in the garage yet we've hardly put a dent in packing up.  *Sigh*

On the house hunting front, we haven't seen anything new listed.  So we haven't been out looking.  Our own house has been shown 4 times since being listed.  We've had positive feedback from the showing agents.  So we're feeling good about the potential buyers being out there somewhere and ready to make an offer in the not so far off future.  Fortunately these showings haven't affected our schooling.  So this has been an answer to prayer.

On the adoption front, you may be wondering what's happened to our paperwork.  Well, we've had 3 documents expire so that the Chinese Embassy won't authenticate them.  That means I've spent this week obtaining a new police clearance for me (easy enough) and a new marriage license and birth certificate for Patrick.  Then we'll have to get all three state sealed before sending them off for authentication.  While I'm not particularly thrilled about them being expired by just a few days, I know that in the "big picture", this snag doesn't mean much. And I'm okay with that. We'll still be DTC in September, which is fine with us.

So that about sums up this past week.  And since I haven't taken any new photos, I thought I would go ahead and share these cute ones I took of the kids a few weeks ago with my studio lights.  I would normally pay closer attention to the background so as to minimize the cloning when editing the images (you may recall this paper is sized for headshots, not multiple kids.)  But I just wanted to snap a few of them and not worry about finding the time to edit them.