A week of so many ups

This week just keeps getting better. :)

Last night, we figured out how to get the video on our camera to work.

I almost started crying...tears of joy that we can take video again, and tears of sadness at all of the things I wanted to video this year and didn't.

I don't know if you remember our camera saga, but we bought one shortly after we returned home with the boys. We really liked it, it was great, it took video and good pictures. But for some inexplicable reason, it couldn't hold a charge in the batteries. Literally, we could take 6 pictures and then need to recharge the batteries. We finally took it back and got a newer model (same brand). Also great pictures, really great optical zoom (10x, which is great for when Mark is playing outfield with his vintage base ball team), and it was supposed to take video. Which it did. Except the audio and video didn't match up, and the whole video was choppy. We talked about taking it back, but couldn't decide on another camera we wanted and we were really happy with the camera other than not having video. Yeah, I know, we could have just gone and gotten a camcorder, but we aren't big spenders and it seemed like an unnecessary expense given how much we would be likely to (not) use it.

Then, yesterday, I was looking at our blog archives for someone else. And I came across this:

Zhenya

I almost started crying watching it. Can this really be the same little boy in my house, one year later, who doesn't know a word of Russian and can talk for HOURS about everything under the sun? Who knows all of his colors, letters, shapes (he told me yesterday a stop sign is an octagon!), and is at the beginning stages of reading sight words?

We don't have pictures or video of their first steps, their first words, their first birthdays. And we never will. But we have such a precious gift in video of them before they learned English, to watch that transition--such an important part of their history.

And so yesterday I vowed that if I could not get our camera to take video that we would get something that would take video before we brought the girls home.

Last night Mark and I were looking online at camera options, and I noticed that one of them mentioned something about a video setting that I'd never heard of. Thinking that maybe something was just set wrong on our camera, I got it out and looked at the video settings. It was set for the largest, highest resolution video. I switched it down to the next lowest one and videotaped Mark talking to me. It worked. We have video again. :)