Cupcake Calendar: January

Previously on "OMFG That Bitch Is Totally Frakking Crazy": I whined about needing a vacation. And now I am getting one. Key West. February. Smoking deal on a room at a nice hotel, thanks to Priceline. Bathing suit and books already packed. Don't know what else I will need, but Cupcake, of course, will need an entire new wardrobe, which we are already working on. (Can't get my resolutions done within the affected year, but I am all chop-chop! when it comes to the Cupcake.) I promise not to talk too much about it until the week or so before we leave, because I'm going to be mostly dead from working too hard. (Which is still slightly alive.) To be continued ... dun-dun-duuuuuuuuuun ...

Now it's time for Arts & Crafts. Back in September when I starting worrying about Christmas I decided that I was going to make a Cupcake Calendar for the important female relatives: the Grandmothers and the Aunties. Plus, I wanted to have one myself, because then I could change up my kid's pictures without having to go to all the trouble of printing a picture, picking it up from the CVS or wherever, opening the frame, inserting the picture, etc. More than one step = too much trouble! (I keep telling you people, I am a slack-ass.)

This isn't the first time I made a calendar -- I did it before, in 2006-7, when I made a calendar of all the grandchildren on my mother's side of the family. I thought it turned out really well, even though my grandmother never actually used it. It's still in the plastic bag on top of the hutch in her dining room. From time to time when we visit, I take it out to show the baby, so she can learn to recognize everyone. It was a fun project, if a little exhausting, because I am not always very creative, and also I am a bit anal-retentive (I know, right?), so there were a few pages that were repeatedly redone because margins weren't uniform and some pictures were wonky sizes and actually it's hurting my head just thinking about it now.

So when I started the Cupcake Calendar, I set a few ground rules for myself. No more than four pictures per page. Use Picture Manager to crop and resize so that stuff would be at least in the same proportions. (I started this project before I discovered the Picnik tool on Flickr.) Relax, for God's sake. Remember that these people are going to love it anyway, no matter how craptacular or craftastrophic it turns out to be, because these people love Cupcake. Try to have fun with this.

I started at the beginning of the 2008 photo files, used some of the earliest shots we had of Cupcake (she wasn't with us in January, but we did start spending time with her in February), carefully scoured the Intarwebs for the perfect background for the scrapbook-style mat I was trying to create, and this is what I came up with for January:

I did the same thing for every month of the year. Well, not the same pictures, obviously, but the same process. I probably spent 2 hours picking out the photos for each calendar page, and then another hour or so per page reasearching backgrounds, plus the time I spent farting around with Publisher to match picture box outlines to the wallpaper, making the outline boxes fit properly, looking at the Print Preview page from across the room, autofixing and un-autofixing and re-autofixing, etc. I was kind of a wreck. (Which is different from usual how, exactly?)

AND THEN I FOUND OUT ABOUT SHUTTERFLY'S CALENDAR MAKER. YOU PEOPLE NEED TO TELL ME THESE THINGS!

Anyway ... this was going to be a story about how when I look at this calendar on my cubicle wall every day, I remember that very first weekend that we were "parents," how absolutely terrified we were that we were going to do something wrong, that we were going to be complete goofbags when it came time to change a diaper, how this is the only weekend that Cupcake spent with my parents where she actually took a nap, etc., etc., but instead here I am telling you about how oh my God, I spent approximately eleventy million hours a year on the Innartubes and I didn't know that there were programs that magically made calendars.

Maybe next month I will (1) get the calendar page up on time and (2) actually tell you some stories about the pictures. But I make no promises, because I will always be crazy.