'Tis the Season--of travel!

We don’t really have anything overly exciting or new to report, but I thought I’d do a quick update in case anyone is wondering what is going on with us.  We are still in our home study.  Everything pretty much lies in our hands now.  There is a lot, and I mean a lot, of training you are required to do for Hague country adoptions (and we are adopting from a Hague country).  It’s all good, just a bit overwhelming, and honestly, tedious, at times.  We had to read a book on attachment disorders, and have had to read a lot of information about the country that is put out by the US government (history information, travel information, etc).  We were also required to do an online hague course, which took 10 hours to complete.  I thought we’d never get finished, and just as we finished, I enrolled us in our final online medical adoption class online to find out that is also 10 hours.  Our goal is to try to watch all those videos and wrap that up this week.  I’ll eventually post on all the attachment issues and so on at a later time.  It is intense, though.
We did get our initial packet of paperwork shipped off to the adoption agency prior to vacation.  I’m glad to have that round of paper chasing behind us.  It means that things are moving—slowly (at least it feels that way to me)—but they are moving, which is good. We do have to send in pictures of our house, and I’ve been slowly taking those photos.  I’m having to clean up a room at a time and take the picture (let me rephrase that—I have to pick up the piles of clutter and move them out of the way so I can take a picture).  I’m getting there, though, as we’ve started decorating for the holidays and I’ve been cleaning up in order to do the decorating.
In the mean time we’ve been some traveling people the last month or so.  We planned our vacation to Nags Head months ago, and were eagerly looking forward to it.  About mid-September we went apple picking in NC, and I happened to read something right after that trip about the fall colors and the elk bugling in Cataloochee (in the smokies).  I love fall colors, and love to hear elk bugling, something I first heard on our first trip to the Tetons/YNP a few years ago.  I decided I’d like to fit a quick weekend trip in, prior to our trip to the obx, to see those things.  So, we did that the weekend prior to leaving for Nags Head.  It was a great trip, all be it a little cold (we camped), and then we left the next week for Nags Head.  We had a great week in Nags Head and caught lots of fish.  We did get knocked around a little by Sandy, but we made it out of there just in the nick of time.
Anyway, we were home for a week, and then this past weekend we decided to take a day trip up to Clemson for the football game.  We did not go to a football game last year, and I wanted to take Kathryn back to another game since the one and only game she’s been to was when she was 4 months old.  It was a long haul with a super long walk from Kite Hill to the stadium, but we both agreed that it was worth the effort.  Kathryn loved the band (yeah!), as well as the balloons and all the excitement surround the tigers running down the hill.
This coming weekend we’ll be having Thanksgiving with my parents, and then we’ll be in NC for Thanksgiving with David’s family.  Once we get home, I think I’m going to stay put for a while.  So what does that mean?  It means we’ll probably stay put for a month, give or take a week, and then we’ll be out on some other excursion.  We can’t seem to stay put around here for any length of time.  It’s all good, though.
So that’s just a quick update.  I hope to have some more exciting news (i.e. we’re finished with our home study and it’s being shipped to SC DSS) soon—very soon!