Why I Have No Pictures to Show

So the birthday party went great. Here's why I have no pictures to show yet.

A first birthday is bittersweet. Somewhat sentimental, right? I mean, the baby year has gone. You're welcoming the toddler stage, full of lots of new challenges and surprises. To commemorate the event, I decided I was going to make a slideshow of music and pictures from the last year. And then I was gonna tally up how many people cried by the end, myself included.

It was going to be approximately 175 pictures long, from birth to 12 months with 3 songs, all fading in and fading out.

Attempt 1: Used Nero because it had a nifty "Make a picture slideshow" button. Easy enough! 25% of the way finished and the program freezes up my computer. I get that wonderful message that says, "Nero has encountered a problem and must close. You will lose any unsaved data." Had I saved it? Of course not.

Attempt 2: Used Nero again, saving every time I put in new pictures. After picture 99 (of 175) was entered (I would tell you the percentage, but I can't divide in my head. Over 50%. How's that?) I get yet another message. "You have reached the maximum capacity of pictures allowed in a Nero slideshow. Would you like to start another slideshow?" I was seriously about to pull my hair out. I closed down the program and waited for Andrew to get home.

I had now sacrificed TWO naptimes for NOTHING.

Attempt 3: 2 nights before the party. A little stressed. Windows Movie Maker this time. I had forgotten why I hated it so much several years ago. Because it STINKS. You have to manually click each slide to fade in and reclick it to fade out. So 175 x 2. Equals...I don't know. A LOT OF CLICKING. Then I realized the default time for each slide was set at 10 seconds. That's a lot of time to look at one single picture. I wanted it set at 3 seconds. Guess what? You can't just "select all" and change the time for every picture. Nope. Gotta individually change all 175. Added in the music. Made sure music and picture times matched. Done. Finally. Saved. Went to bed.

Friday, the day before the party, I walked into the bedroom to see a black screen with white writing flashing. The computer was making a loud clicking noise. Yep. The computer died- along with all of Drew's pictures, the movies from the last 12 months, and the slideshow, all of which we thought were backing up on a different computer. They weren't. I cried. Andrew was mortified. He called people and found out if he put the computer in the freezer for at least 2 hours, he would have about 20 minutes to get whatever he could get off. Well, we got the pictures off. Not the movies. Not the slideshow. We're still working on getting the movies back. That's all I care about.

So, to make a long story longer, I stayed up until 1:30 on the morning of his birthday party to complete the slideshow for a second time.

It was worth it.

Lots of laughs. Lots of tears.

So once I get my computer back which has an SD card slot, I'll upload pictures. Until then, you're stuck reading what I have to write and imagining a little boy who played his heart out.