Adafruit Motor Shield Purchased and Soldered

I've been really busy lately doing a variety of things so I haven't gotten a chance to make any posts about my progress, but that doesn't mean there hasn't been progress. As a result, I'll be making a flurry of posts very shortly about the variety of things I've accomplished over the last month or so. Just before I went on winter break the Adafruit Motor Shield I'm going to use to drive my servo motors was delivered and over the break, I soldered it together (it comes as a bag of assorted components, which is a bit of a pain, but also was a good opportunity to learn how to solder). This is the finished product:

After plugging it in and hooking up my two servos as a test, I found that the motor shield was functional (the power light turned on) and that it was capable of driving the two servos without an external power source, running purely off of Arduino power. However, I'm concerned that once I begin hooking up other components to the Arduino, the motors will fail to function, just as they did previously when I powered them through the Arduino without  use of the motor shield while using other components. Because of this concern, I've decided to use external power with the motor shield, even though it involves cutting some trace on the shield, a process I'm a little concerned about doing, as a small slip would pretty much ruin the entire component. Nevertheless, I'm convinced it's necessary so I'll be doing that shortly and then attempting to run the motors using a 5v wall wart. More posts on how exactly I'm hoping to do that will follow shortly.

There's also one more issue I've discovered with the motor shield--it fits directly on top of the Arduino and hooks up to every single pin, making them impossible to access for use with other components, such as buttons, LEDs, potentiometers, etc. However, after researching I have found that the analog pins on the Arduino are still available and can be accessed through the shield. However, as I don't want to solder wires directly to the board and there were no female headers included in the components I received from Adafruit, I'm in the process of ordering a set of female headers that I can solder on to the shield and use as serial ports. As soon as they've arrived and been soldered, I should be able to begin testing the shield in earnest, using potentiometers to control the two motors while the kinect program is still being developed.