Cut & Paste

For someone who would much rather spend her time actually cutting and pasting - spreading a big sheet of paper out on a table and physically manipulating things to fit into the space, trying them here, trying them there, cutting them apart with scissors and then pasting them back together with glue - all the time I've had to spend on Photoshop working on our Dear Birthparent Letter has, let's face it, not been the highlight of the adoption process for me. I get it: technically, what I'm doing on Photoshop is the same thing. Technically. But sliding a mouse around and striking keys to manipulate the pieces is just not as satisfying to my brain somehow.

And that's not even getting into the real difficulty of it all. Distilling our lives, our relationship, our love for one another, the love that we have to share, into four pages. That's, of course, the real kicker. How do we pick the 12-15 photos that perfectly embody everything we want to convey? (And who documents their life that faithfully, anyway? I mean, I'm a photographer and we don't seem to have enough photos of us engaging in our favorite activities, hanging out casually with our friends, visiting with our families.) How do we find the words that tell everything we want to about ourselves?

The real answer, I guess, is that we don't. I mean, really, how can we? It's impossible. So, we do the best we can. We give a good enough summary that a potential BP wants to learn more. Like the blurb on the back of a book jacket, the teaser for a news story, a movie trailer. And then, I guess, we hope it's enough.