Learning to make an Adoption Video

So making an adoption video should be easy right?
Well, not as easy as it may seem.  I spent 7 hours on Saturday uploading and editing to create a video only to upload it to You Tube and have it watermarked the whole way through smack in the middle of the video.  UGH!!! So much time wasted and now back to square one which is buy a different program and download it.  So I bought one and it wasn't the same at all to the one I had used before, although from the same company meant back to that learning curve I'd had the day before.  That turned into another frustrating experience so I read a bunch of reviews and bought yet another program.  Back, again, to square one after download.
So I'm getting the hang of this new program but it's still time consuming because it comes with only 2 templates and they are in no way what I wanted so I spent Monday downloading templates, titles, etc into the program.  I then started a project, got half way through and tossed it out.  Tuesday I actually produced the video and it was pretty good but now I needed to learn the audio so off to You Tube school I went.  Audio was pretty intuitive but I was just missing one key component Thanks You Tube guy!
So now the audio is done and I plug it into the video so I produce it and can't get it to save in an up-loadable format for our website, so I stopped because after 4 days of roadblocks and frustration I needed to step away.
Wednesday was our 20th Anniversary but Don is out of town, so I'm determined to get this thing done and uploaded.  I produced it a few times and then made more changes and long story short I finally got it to save in the correct format for upload to the website so I upgrade our website to handle video so I can forgo using the you tube video and it keeps having an error on upload.  I went back and produced every usable format of the video to try uploading, none of them work.  I sent in an email to customer service and thankfully they were really nice about the situation.  I was able to load the video to one drive, share it and they were able to upload it directly to our website for me.  Turns out the loader was timing out before the video could upload and looping which was causing the error.  So while I had no trouble uploading it to You Tube, our internet connection was too slow for their timeout (Life in the burbs).  Thankfully, as of next week our internet speed will triple (and still be behind the cities) and it shouldn't continue to be an issue.
Learning new things can be frustrating but I am so glad I took the time to learn them.  It will really come in handy later when I am piecing together videos and pictures of our child to share with the birth family (if they want them) and our own families.  I plan to get making videos of our travels until I get all the components ingrained and no longer have to think about what I'm doing.  My aunt does this for the family but she is the only one until now.  As frustrating as it was I was having fun in the end learning something new and useful once I got the right program for me to use.
If you're interested in our video it can be found Here
In other news Don and I are actually doing some fun stuff for our anniversary this year (although late) and I can't wait to share it all once it's over and I have details and pictures.
Have a great week everyone!

Fun in the sun with family on my cousin's sailboat

Anniversary plans....The Best laid Plans gone awry

Our 20^th Anniversary is coming up in April and we originally planned on going to New York for 7 days but as they say the best laid plans….

We have some friends who were going with us (we chose dates outside our actual anniversaries) to celebrate their 30^th together and thought it would be a great trip with so many friends and family to meet up with and of course the amazing shows and just being in the city.  I LOVE visiting New York and we always try to plan our trips around baseball games. We have friends there or close by and I was looking forward to seeing them and meeting his new wife and son.  I was looking forward to Carmine’s, a Yankees game and Broadway shows as well as spring in Central Park.

Well then the attack in Brussels happened and our friend’s wife said to cancel their part of the trip (We’d extended our days to spend time with them in the city).  Then a couple days ago I lost my grandma so we canceled the 7 days in the city to save some of Don’s vacation time and will be going to Florida for a couple days instead.

I’m pretty excited actually because I’d originally offered up Florida as one of our trip options.  Don has been to Florida so many times he kind of dismissed it by offering up other trips and since he was stationed there for basic training I went with it with my own counter offers (especially since we just went to Disneyland in January).  I have wanted to go to Universal for the Harry Potter stuff (and last time I went to universal studios in LA or anywhere I was 12) and we’ve never been to Epcot.  I can’t believe it but we made an action packed theme park vacation for 3 ½ days.   I’ve bought us tickets for Epcot, Universal park hopper and for Busch gardens in Tampa.  Day 4 we fly home in the evening so we plan on going to the beach that day because let’s face it you can’t go to Florida without going to the beach and I’m a beach girl.  I Love the beach; I pretty much spent my childhood at the beach and it’s a great exfoliation opportunity for your feet.

Needless to say we're super excited, especially since Don will be traveling for work on our actual anniversary.  This isn’t something new; we’ve dealt with it before and really all that matters to us is the acknowledgement of starting our lives together which was 5 years before we made it official. 

Hopefully soon we'll be worrying about how to change diapers in a theme park or while waiting in line places.