What a Life!

I’ve decided…this is the photo that is going out with my Christmas letter. [Yes, Christmas letter – I’m so late getting it out that a card would only be up for two days anyway and if the people I’m sending them to are anything like my parents, the card and letter may be thrown away but the picture will be on the fridge for the entire year. Not worth the expense of buying and sending a card. I promise, I will stock up on cards after Christmas, and I will send out cards with my letter next year.]

I wrote our Christmas letter this weekend, and then I had an interesting realization. The letter is basically going to people we don’t see hardly all year so it really is news to them what we do and where we live. In other words, it isn’t written for immediate family who know all that stuff already. With that said, the only people we send such a thing to are my family and friends. As for Steve’s family, either we see them during the year or we wouldn’t recognize them if we saw them on the street (and we don’t hear from them at Christmas time either). Steve has no desire for me to send them a Christmas letter, so I’m not going to bother.

Yes, it’s of my dad and the boys, but everyone getting it knows my dad, and I think the picture is interesting enough that it will draw people’s attention just as a picture. Such fun!

Ah, the great ideas one has in the shower! I must take showers more often…

P.S. Coming soon…the pages for my 2008 calendar.

This is for my Dad. A male a cappella chorus. And a whole new way of singing the Twelve Days of Christmas. The rest of you will enjoy it too.

I have a friend who I knew shared my love of photography. I also knew she had purchased a professional muslin backdrop for taking pictures. What I didn’t know is that she’s developed her skills to the point where she wants to start her own portrait photography business on the side.

We were over at her house today for playgroup and I told her about my frustrations with finding a wall-worthy photo of my boys among the thousands of pictures I’ve taken this year. After everyone else left, she got her set out, and while we didn’t get any good ones of the boys together (they were tired and so were we), she did get some cute ones of me with Joey.

I’m usually the one behind the camera so these pictures are such a treasure. If you pop on over to my flickr site, you can see more of the pictures she took. We may go back next week for more, depending on how things go around here.

I spent most of the morning uploading the rest of the pictures I am having printed for photo albums. A total of 612 photos with my first digital camera, through February 22nd of this year. I’m sure there may be a few more I toss when I go to put them in albums, but at a mere $0.12 cents a piece, I think I can handle it.

I spent most of the afternoon working on the pages for the calendar. I found this software over at Shutterfly where you can create collages. Of course, their intention is that you’ll buy stuff from them with the collages you make. And, perhaps someday I will. But for now, I’m enjoying the handy feature called “Export” where it makes a jpeg file of the collage you just made.

The software isn’t anything to crow about. It’s dreadfully slow – hit the wrong button and you’ll pay with at least 5 minutes of your time getting back to where you wanted to go. You ability to edit the collages doesn’t go beyond deciding which layout to use and how each picture you select fits in the particular layout (you can adjust left/right/up/down as well as zoom in and out). But, you cannot edit a collage once you navigate away from it.

And the little thumbnails they give you to select your pictures from are too small to see what they are. I worked back and forth between Picasa where I chose which pictures I wanted and Shutterfly Studio where I was assembling my collage. When you start a collage, you can select which folders you want to take photos from, but if your photos are scattered, it was easier just to Export using Picasa and then use that sole file to work from. I did the Export thing on about half of the pages, and when I was done, I wished I had done it on all of them. It would have made re-creating a collage much easier when I saw things I wanted to adjust later.

For now, this project is at rest. I’ll come back to it once I have time to mull over what I did and whether actually like the themes I chose. Ironically, I hand these calendars out to everyone and Steve takes one to work, but we never have one at home. By the time I’m done working on the calendar, I’m sick of seeing the pictures anyway so I never ask for an extra. When we go over to other people’s houses, I see them, of course. But when they come to visit us and mention the current picture, sometimes I have to think about what they’re talking about…but it only takes me a moment and I know. So in mulling over whether I like what I’ve done or not, I don’t really have anything to compare it to. I know that sounds really lame since I’ve been doing these calendars since Ben was born, but it’s true. [I guess Steve just tosses his at the end of the year. I know we don’t have any stashed anywhere.]

Okay, I’m rambling. Time to call it a day. We’re going to town tomorrow and I haven’t even planned all my stops yet. And I need to make a menu and a grocery list. Monday is the day I’m shipping gifts to Florida as well as the day Mom plans to ship the calendars and my Christmas letter to me along with our gifts. Must. get. busy. Monday will be here before I know it.

My headache is back. I think it’s just the insanity of it all. I feel like a cat chasing my tail. Seriously.

On Monday, I started knitting a pair of the Broad Street Mittens I mentioned yesterday. I worked on them here and there, and at the end of the day, the only thing I had to show for my efforts was a pair of sore arms. I had been knitting at 8 stitches per inch, and clearly, with the yarn and needles I was using, not only was it wearing me out, but it would also take much longer than it would if I did it at the 7 stitches per inch as called for in the original pattern.

So yesterday morning, when I arose at 5:00 a.m., I started again, this time, knitting much looser. I achieved the necessary gauge and had the ribbing done by the time I went to take a shower (Steve comes upstairs shortly after 7:00 and I run down to get a shower before he leaves – otherwise I don’t have a chance until Joey takes his morning nap).

I worked on the project here and there throughout the day and by 4:00 or so, I had this to show for my efforts:

We ate supper and did all our regular evening stuff, and once the boys were in bed, I set out to finish the fingers. By bedtime, I had this to show for my efforts:

The palm looked a little long to me so I asked Steve to try it on for me. His hands look big, but mostly he just has long fingers. On the ones I knit him originally, he’s told me the fingers are a bit loose so I did the fingers on this one in ribbing so it would pull in and stay close to the finger. Well, he said the fingers are a bit snug. Alas! There goes an evening’s worth of knitting…and it’s not like I have an evening to spare.

So the knitting has been set aside and today my focus is back on pictures.

My husband is, in many ways, a very patient man. Though I have many failings as a wife and mother, he takes them in stride and does not complain. But if I was to make a list of his top 5 complaints, they would be as follows:

1. Why aren’t any of our photos in photo albums so we can look at them?
2. I wish we had photo albums to enjoy.
3. We don’t have any photos in albums since we got rid of the film Canon Rebel back when Ben was little.
4. I wish we had photo albums to look at.
5. Are you ever going to get any photos in albums so we can look at them?

Or something like that.

So, for Christmas, my gift to Steve is going through all my photos on the computer, downloading them and having them printed out. Then I will assemble them in albums (which were purchased here and there as I came across ones I liked), wrap them up and put them under the tree. They have a special over at Shutterfly where you can purchase 500 4×6 photos printed for a mere $0.12 each – since I am going back to photos taken in 2003, I will be taking advantage of that offer.

I’ve told Steve, when he’s seen me working on the computer, that I’m working on a project for him for Christmas. But he has absolutely no idea what it is. [Though if he reads my blog, the secret has now been spilled. I wouldn’t care if he did read my blog, but I don’t think he does, and the things I talk about here are mostly the things on my mind that I think would only bore him so I blabber about them here instead.] He swears he doesn’t need anything for Christmas and that he hasn’t asked for anything, which only adds to the fun.

But 500 pictures. Seriously. I’m about halfway through the photos taken with my first digital camera which had that two-second delay between when you hit the shutter and when the picture was actually taken. With that camera, many of the pictures didn’t turn out (due to that fabulous delay), and my photo-taking style was still much like the style one employs with a film camera where you pay $0.33 for each shot, whether it turns out well or not.

As I go through the pictures, which are sorted by the month in which they were taken, I find myself printing 1/2 to 2/3 of them. I’ll have two or three shots of the same scene, and I’ll just pick the best one. Just the same, this process is very tedious and intense. I work until the downloading window tells me it has x number of pictures remaining which will take about a half hour to download, and then I take a break while it finishes. And these are the little files from the old camera (2.1 megapixel I think?). This is quite a chore. I don’t even want to think about what assembling them into albums with two little boys running around is going to be like. Perhaps we should call it the ultimate gift of love.

My original plan was to get completely up-to-date with picture printing, but I may stop when I have 500. Or I may stop when I get to February of this year when I upgraded to my Canon S3 IS and started taking 400 pictures a month instead of an average of 40. Then I’m thinking this will be my annual gift to the family – printing out my best photos from the previous year and assembling them into albums. Perhaps I should be doing this every month instead, but sometimes distance makes it easier to choose which pictures are truly album-worthy. Theoretically.

Of course, while the pictures are downloading, I browse through this year’s pictures and contemplate which ones are wall-worthy. I’m still stuck on that. I have come up with some new insight, however, as to why this task is so difficult.

Most of the best pictures I’ve taken are candid shots of my children doing things. Such as this one.

Joey reaching for his birthday cake after we pulled it away so we could light the candle. Clearly, we took it away before he was done playing with it.

These Halloween pictures of Ben are good examples of that as well.

A good portrait has the following characteristics:

• Subject is wearing nice clothing, not dirty or torn play clothes (regardless of how practical or realistic such clothes may be in real life)
• Subject is looking at the camera and has a pleasant expression, if not a smile, on their face (in most candids, they’re looking at what they’re doing)
• And, the background is fairly simple (while I do pay some attention to this with my pictures, what is appropriate for a candid action shot – and even necessary to give context for such a shot – doesn’t work to well for a portrait worthy of being hung on someone’s wall)

I am having great difficulties selecting which photos to include in the calendar this year because I have so many really good candid shots of the boys. At the same time, I only have a couple semi-acceptable portrait shots of Joey and hardly any of Ben. Not good when you want to give wall-worthy photos as Christmas gifts.

Thus, I’m now actually thinking of buying those collage frames like this one which holds six 4×6 shots – I could put three of each of the boys in it and give that instead of 5x7s or 8x10s for Christmas. The price is right. I could just include six of my best candids and they wouldn’t have to be portraits. No sweat. But wait! Availability: Item arriving in 2 to 6 weeks. Uh, that would be after Christmas.

Which I think is why my head hurts so bad. If it isn’t my knitting going awry, it’s the style of my best photos not matching the need I currently am trying to fill. Oh, whatever am I to do? I need to decide quickly, or nothing is going to arrive in time for Christmas.

But I will leave you, dear reader, with a laugh rather than a headache. Alissa has this favorite tree she’s always taking pictures of – different seasons, time of day, etc. In fact, she has a whole set over on flickr with photos of that tree.

I, however, am a SAHM who doesn’t leave the house very often, and who certainly does not lead this glamorous life where I drive down this scenic country road and by this photogenic tree every day on my way to and from work. So instead, I present you with what I have discovered is my most often photographed subject – Steve and Ben sitting together on the couch.

I swear, I have one (or more!) shots of the two of them like that every month. I could build a whole set of my own over on flickr with those pictures. Welcome to my world! Oh my!

Enough for today. I have things to do.

[On a side note…The lens on my camera – a 50/1.8 – is the equivalent of an 85 mm, which is what many photographers consider a “portrait” lens. As in, you can get an up close and personal shot without having to get, shall we say, in the face of the subject. The main difficulty I have with it is that I am unable to capture as much of the context (aka background) that makes the photo. If they’re making a cute silly face but you don’t know why, it’s a cute silly face, but the photo would be so much more powerful if you got the why in the picture as well. Which is why I want that 35/2 lens so badly. It would just be so much more practical than the lens I have now.]

I must confess, usually my Christmas shopping is done – everything has been purchased and any projects are well on their way to being done – in October. This year, ’twas not to be. This week I am finally getting my act together and figuring out what gifts we will be giving.

That means (a) if I’m ordering things online, I’m up against the wall with shipping deadlines. Not just shipping to me but to the recipient as well. Considering how much ice is on the roads at the moment, online shopping is my only option…which doubles the urgency. And (b) if I am to make anyone anything, time is of the essence, to put it mildly.

Yesterday my head was spinning. I had a headache for the second day in a row and so my husband again asked for an accounting of what was going on. Last time, he wanted to know what was on my wish list. As you could tell by my comments the other day, telling my husband what I wanted only emphasized the fantasy nature of my list. When I confess my shopping list, the fantasy will only grow larger.

You see, every year, I try to average $10-out-of-pocket per person. I know, that sounds incredibly cheap. But I try to give gifts that are valued in the $40 to $50 range, depending on how you add things up.

First of all, everyone gets calendars with the best of my pictures of the boys over the course of the year. Those have a retail value of $20 each. My parents own a printshop and make these for me. Supposedly they subtract the wholesale value of those calendars from my Christmas present every year. I never try to figure out how much they spend (or don’t spend) on me so essentially, it costs me nothing. And everyone loves those calendars.

Then, pictures of the boys. My favorite pictures were always done by Erica over at Images for a Lifetime. Her rates, in addition to any sitting fee, are $12 for a 4×6, $18 for a 5×7 and $30 for an 8×10. For that reason, people who got excited every year over JCPenny pictures got JCPenny pictures (Steve’s family). In fact, I have never hung any of the pictures I bought for us from Erica because I am embarrassed that I didn’t buy them for everybody – their quality makes JCPenny pictures look awful. I bought the nicer pictures for my parents, in part, because they did the calendars for me every year. And my sister and her husband see those pictures, so they get some of the same.

Let’s say my pictures are better than JCPenny and at least half as good as Erica’s. If I give a picture of each boy, two 4×6’s are valued at $12 and two 5x7s are $18. This year, everyone is getting pictures that I have taken, so we’re up to $32 for uncles and aunts (they get 4x6s) and $38 for grandparents (with 5x7s). Out-of-pocket costs – minimal.

[And no, it doesn’t cost me that much to print out a 4×6 or 5×7 at Walgreens. But it doesn’t cost the pros much more than that either, but they charge what they do because (a) they use good – expensive – equipment and (b) they work very hard to perfect their skills so they can produce pictures worthy of such prices. I, too, have more than just an everyday camera, and I also work very hard to perfect my skills in order to improve the quality of my pictures. My goal for next year is to improve both my skills and my equipment so that my pictures are worthy of 2/3 to 3/4 of what Erica charges. Alissa‘s would be 100% Erica-value, in my opinion, and she’s just a mom taking pictures of her kids, using a good camera that she’s worked hard to learn how to use. I want to be like her.]

But selecting which pictures to use this year. Oh my! I have plenty of 8×10 worthy photos of Joey, but with Ben, it’s a different story. In part, I have more pictures of Joey than Ben – he’s little, he does lots of cute things, and he’s growing so quickly. I have cute pictures of Ben, but in most of them, he’s wearing tattered play clothes. I have lots of 4×6-worthy pictures, some 5×7-worthy, but 8×10-worthy? I look at the pictures and think, I’m going to have to stare at that klutzy picture for years to come – do I really want to make an 8×10 out of that? Oh, the agony! {You can go here and view the current contenders.}

Right now, these two are the top picks:

But, then again, I could set up the Christmas tree and somehow magically manage to get a good picture of both the boys in the outfits I had planned to take Christmas pictures in. I’m thinking the tree might get set up downstairs this year. Joey doesn’t go downstairs very often, and I would put the tree next to the bookcase, which, together, might create a pretty good backdrop for a picture. Otherwise, it’s too cold to take pictures outside without heavy jackets, and there aren’t really any other good places to go inside the house. I have a friend who purchased a backdrop she uses to take photos of her kids, but it is gray and the boys sweaters are charcoal – I’m thinking that wouldn’t work very well. And say I do find a good place to take pictures of them, the next trick is actually getting wall-worthy shots of the two of them together. Steve thought my Christmas wish list was a fantasy – it ain’t nothin’ compared to my holiday shopping list. Oh my!

Regardless, people will get calendars and pictures because that’s what we do every year and everyone seems to love it. Now that I’m an aunt, I have a whole new understanding of the thrill of such simple things.

But I feel bad stopping there. So I try to do one little extra personal thing for everyone. That’s where the $10-thing comes in. I feel rather stupid giving someone a $10 gift card or something that I purchased that they know cost only $10, even if it was on their wish list. A $30 or $40 choice from someone’s wish list would be more respectable, but that adds up quickly.

Back when I learned to knit, my motivation was, in part, the fact that longies (wool pants that serve as diaper covers over cloth diapers) cost $70 and upward per pair but the yarn only costs around $20. Granted, a lot of time and effort goes into knitting a pair of longies, and even at the prices those longies sell for, you do not get rich knitting longies. Fifty dollars profit for ten hours of your time works out to a mere $5/hr.

And handmade gifts are tricky. Yes, a lot of time and love goes into them – which is something I happen to have in abundance. But you have to understand, no one will appreciate the effort you put into them. Even as a knitter, I know that I do not fully appreciate the value of a knitted gift when I am given one. A cute sweater is a cute sweater – you don’t necessarily think about the time and love that went into making it, and even if you try, it’s just something that is hard to appreciate fully.

And no one really ever asks for handmade gifts. I’ve given handmade gifts that were appreciated in the past. I’ve received handmade gifts that I didn’t initially appreciate but came to treasure as time went by. But a handknit gift carries the same risk that a purchased gift carries – the receiver may not appreciate it as much or be as excited about it as you might have hoped. Considering the time and effort that goes into making such a thing, it comes as no surprise that crafting forums always contain threads about recipients not appreciating gifts that were bestowed, especially this time of year. It’s an easy trap to fall into.

But some of the best gifts I’ve received were things that weren’t on my wish list. Some of them were even handmade. So I take the risk and give handmade gifts anyway. Sometimes I try things on my husband first, especially things for the guys. One year I made Steve some Broad Street Mittens and his brother just drooled over them. If I have enough time when all else is said and done, Schon may get his own pair this year. That would be an example of the thought process behind handmade gifts I give.

And ultimately, when you give a gift, whether it is purchased or handmade, giving it means letting go of it. You may have spent all this time and effort shopping for it or making it. It may or may not be a hit worthy of what you put into it. It may not be appreciated initially as you hoped it might be. But you have to let go of it. Pour your love into the giving of a gift, and leave it at that. If the recipient really does not like or use it, then there is nothing wrong with their passing it on to someone who does. In my opinion, the time and effort someone puts into giving a gift is best honored by seeing to it that it is used and loved, if not by yourself, then by someone else. If something is a burden to you – taking up space in your closet or drawer, by all means, pass it on; a gift that becomes a burden is the worst sort of gift that one can give. If nothing else, the giver gave you an opportunity to feel good about giving to someone else less fortunate. Less fortunate is certainly not limited to charity – it can also include friends and family who see something you have that they would use and love far more than you would ever do.

My only extra insurance policy for handmade gifts is that I do not give anything that I do not enjoy making – it must be a pattern I like, out of materials I like, and in colors that I like. If nothing else, I can say I enjoyed making the item, though that is certainly not why I give handmade gifts. I do not bestow things on people that I do not think they will use and love, even if it is only an occasional use item. Gifts are not an excuse for me to spend money on yarn and feed my knitting (or sewing…or cooking) habit. Rather, handmade gifts are a way for me to give from what I have been blessed – my time and talents. After all, money is not the only currency in gift-giving.

The same could be said for purchased gifts. People talk about scoring at the Dollar Store, and then they complain about getting gifts that are just junk that fill up their closet. The key to a good gift isn’t how much money – or time – you spend; rather, it is how well it is matched to the recipient. If they would really like that item you found at the Dollar Store, by all means, buy it and give it to them. But if you’re buying just so you can check another name off the list, you might want to think twice about what you are doing.

In fact, I will go even further out on a limb here and say that I measure a gift in how much it makes someone happy, not how much I spent on it. I may say I try to average $10-out-of-pocket per person, but I may spend $40 on one person and $4 on another (or 3 hours making a gift for one person and 30 hours making a gift for another) and feel no guilt on account of not treating them “equally.” I measure the value of a gift in how excited I think the person will be to receive it. I’m not always right in what I anticipate, but the intention is the same for each and every person on the list.

Now, this is not to say that everyone is obligated to give handmade gifts. Believe me, if I had lots of money, I would shower it generously. Gifts of money are appreciated more by people who don’t have as much than by those who have more of it. Again, it’s all in matching the gift to the recipient as well as giving from what you have been blessed. One person might scoff at a $10 gift card to Starbucks while another might be thrilled. There is no single Perfect Gift for everyone.

Enough for now. In a future post, I will talk about my gift-giving plans for Steve and the boys this year. It will give you a whole new perspective on my $10-out-of-pocket thing. I really should post it sooner than later since it might save me from looking ridiculous any longer than necessary as I am certain I have made quite a fool out of myself with this post. But the clock is ticking, and I need to spend some time doing rather than talking…