Papers please?

Today was documentation day. We went through all our important papers to decide what is important enough to carry across the ocean.
I realized how much we take for granted living our daily lives in our home country. We have had that marriage certificate now for 12 years and have never once used it. But apparently we need to have it, and a copy, with us at all times now.
The fabulous part about this process is that we are going to be so much more organized and streamlined. We are headed for a more simple life, in terms of the amount of stuff we deal with anyway, and I am really looking forward to that.

Home from vacation; packing begins in earnest

So now we're back from our little hiatus in which we pretended we weren't busy packing our house to leave for a year. We had a nice time in Maine and New Hampshire despite some torrential summer downpours and got some good extended family time. We visited with grandparents, aunts, uncles, and friends, performed our annual wedding re-enactment on our anniversary, swam in the pond, and generally had a good ol' time.

Now, however, it's down to brass tacks (now there's an expression to consider...how would that translate into German?). The kids are off to day camp for the next two weeks and we parents have to get to business. There are plenty of jobs that need doing in addition to going room by room to sort things out so we'll be plenty busy. Too bad we don't have a dumpster into which we can just fling all the stuff we no longer need.