Pictures for the Officials

One of my current projects is to create a few pages of pictures that represent our house and family. I haven’t worked on it much, because I haven’t had a scanner to scan our latest professional family photos and I haven’t had the spare brain cells to figure out how to pick up a room and take a picture and keep the girls out of the room while I’m taking the picture. This morning I picked up a bit and took a few pictures.

But first, before I show you those, here is what an apostille looks like from the state of Oregon! This is a picture of our commitment docs for Seamus, ready to ship on over to Eastern Europe! The apostilles cost $10 each. Yowza. Shipping these babies cost $86.97. Youch! We’ll have two more packets of papers to ship before we’re done adopting him, I think. One that is our dossier and one that is our stage two paperwork with updated medicals, etc.

Maggie Portrait, by Anna:

Mama sporting her new birthday apron (Thank you Hollie!) and Maggie sporting her Christmas dressup:

1 out of 10 potatoes really do explode if you don’t prick them with a fork before baking! And that is Brian’s birthday cake, half cooked. OOooooh, yummy.

We got a pass to the Children’s Museum from our library. There is a great “Pet Hospital” area that had so much fun stuff to do. I wanted to pretend! Anna was wanting to go from place to place really quick to make sure she saw and touched everything. Maggie was overawed and just kind of walked around staring and stopping to stare with an amazed look on her face. It was pretty adorable.

Here is Anna taking her dog to go potty:

Here is my dad reading to Maggie. She has begun to sit still for books… instead of just bringing you a book, climbing onto your lap, flipping through the book, closing the book, then climbing down saying “All done!” (“ah dah!”) with the satisfaction of accomplishing her task. Rinse and repeat. I prefer the sitting still myself.

Here we are at the hotel in the Dalles where Brian was working for two days. We really had a lot of fun, going to the pool four times in two days. The girls were content to play on the steps or sit on the side and kick their feet. I got cold faster than they did and finished the play times in the hot tub. We were all pretty tired and bored by the time we went home, but that was ok…. it was time to go home! I am so glad I went with Brian. A day or two without seeing Brian is the pits!

We also drove across the river to Schreiner Farm and drove up and down their driveway as allowed and saw zebras, camels and what I think were reindeer. Crazy!

And now since you were really wondering what the inside of our house looks like:

Kids’ bedroom 1:

Kids’ bedroom 2:

Love my kitchen. Love my new table:

Living room. Does it look weird that I forgot to open both sides of the curtains or can I get away with it like this?

And now, since I have a few more pictures of our little guy, I will tease you by sharing them one by one as I remember to.