The phone rang on Wednesday afternoon, and no it wasn't THE call. But it was Kelly from our adoption agency asking some questions. She wanted to know if we had our profile book finished (scrapbook for birthmoms to look at.) She remembered me saying in January that I had been working on it and it was almost complete. They have several new birthmoms coming in next week to chose families and they wanted to be able to show our book. They already have snapshots of us and our "dear birthmother" letter, but she wanted have our complete book to show them.
What happened next?
Um, complete panic set in.
I told her that it was almost finished (which was true-ish) and that I would see what I could do to get it to her.
I raced home and proceeded to work on it. For 5 hours. Emily tried to IM with me, but I was so focused, when the chime went off I didn't even know what it was. Sad. Let me explain something about the profile book...it isn't a paper scrapbook. It is a digital scrapbook. Yup, that's right, DIGITAL. Which means I learned how to use Adobe Photoshop CS3 in order to make this scrapbook.
There are pros and cons to this type of scrapbooking...
Pro: there isn't any mess to clean up.
Con: if you don't know what command puts text on the page, you might not get to write any words.
Pro: I can change the file as many times as I want.
Con: I can change the file as many times as I want. Oh, the perfectionism.
Pro: Sizes of things can easily be changed. I want this graphic bigger, I stretch it out. Can't do that with paper.
Con: I might have to cuss at the computer when I can get those graphics to stretch out the way I want them. No, I didn't cuss. But I clicked REALLY, REALLY hard. Yeah, that's tellin' the computer.
Do you get the idea. I slaved over this thing learning a new program and getting it right. I needed to include all sorts of things about us, our families and our house. I drove everyone crazy taking tons of pictures of them over the holidays.
Oh, back to Wednesday night....well, I worked on a couple of the pages, making sure they all had captions and such, then I prepared to upload them to a site that prints them and mails them to you. I can't print them out at home because it would take tons of ink and I can't print 12 x 12 pages in my printer. I thought Charlie might be able to print them at work, but he didn't think he could make it work either, but he had a printer friend in town that could do it for him rushed. So he ran around on Thursday getting it printed, then we laminated the pages, bound them and got it in the mail. It turned out really well. I was so proud of all my hard work.
And as soon as I can figure out how to shrink the file to post on the internet, I will show them off. I shared with several friends at work and they thought it was cute and showed who we are as a couple. I hope so.
As this week goes forward, please pray for the birthmoms coming in to the agency. These will be hard appointments for them...making a decision about the family that will take their babies home. Pray that I will sleep this week, and not lay awake thinking of baby names. Pray that I won't jump every time the phone rings.
Pray, and stay tuned.
family update.
2 years ago
