Dossier photos

So, it appears that I am maybe coming down with the cold C had last week. I did my best to elude it....I've still got Clorox wipes in here near the sofa to wipe down the PC when I want to use it and I've been washing my hands like crazy, but I am pretty sure I've got a mild case of somehting.

No photos of the moebius yet...but it was a big hit at my last Thursday work meeting, and one lady there has already cast on hers.

I have some other knitting photos I haven't downloaded from my camera yet. I can share the dossier photos, though.

6-10 photos sounds like a lot. But really, if you had to represent your life to strangers in 6-10 photos, it would get hard. It was not easy for us to narrow it down. And we had guidelines.

The guidelines for what kinds of photos to send indicate that we should show our lifestyle, have photos of us doing activities we enjoy, and showing an active lifestyle is a good thing. No swimsuits or obvious alcohol, and C nixed any photos with mass displays of food because he's been over there and well, the Chinese don't eat as much as we do and generally don't weigh as much as we do, so displaying our massive portion sizes would probably not be desirable. It was importnat for us to show the family our daughter(s) will join, but we didn't need to show everyone. We had to balance family photos with outdoor photos with what photos are most flattering, didn't have lots of food, etc.

One of us has to be in each photo, we each have to be in at least five photos, and captions would not be translated. I did do simple captions. (Corey and Sherilyn in The Netherlands, Corey with family in our home, Sherilyn with three of our five nieces) I could be as creative as I wanted, but I kept it simple. These had to be mounted on 8.5x11 paper and I left a large margin on the left in case they were bound later. I have some very simple long sticker strips from the CM Asian Miyabi pack, so I used one of those about 1/2 inch in from the right side and overlapped one of the photos over it while offsetting the other photo to the other side. These sticker strips are about 1/4 inch wide and had subtle patterning of small flowers or Asian decorative elements. I did trim a few of the photos, both to remove dead space and to fit them on the pages. I got two photos per page and used 5x7 photos. It is important that none of the photos be blurry and they need to be able to see our faces (which is why I wasn't too keen on the sunglasses...but they see our eyes in all the other 9 photos). I have heard both that they use these photos to help match us with our child and that they just use the passport-style photos. Either way, we made sure all our photos were good.

The CCAA likes to see at least one photo of the inside or outside of our house. That was hard...we don't have many. I liked the Thanksgiving table photo, but C didn't...he said it looked like a photo of a table. I liked it since it not only showed the interior of our home, but it was a good photo of him, our family is in it, showing The Grandparents again, and in general, I think it is a good shot. Since I insisted on that one, I let him put in the waterfall one...I thought maybe it wasn't good because we are wearing sunglasses, but it does show the great outdoors we will be taking our children out to see. I didn't have any really good photos of me with all my brothers and parents, but we did include my parents, DH's sister, and lots of our nieces and nephews. We indicated in our application letter that we enjoy travel and we made a point of showing outdoorsy shots. I wanted the one of C on the Great Wall to go, and he really likes that photo of me in Greece.