This was a great Christmas because all my kids were able to be here. The grandkids all were excited to open their gifts.
The adults agreed for the most part to have any monies that would have been used to buy them gifts to be donated to charity. It made for less wrapping paper to throw away and a sense of pride.
I have been working on all of the slides that I had taken as the kids were growing up. When I got divorced, I for unexplainable reason, didn't take them with me so I had pay $800 to have them scanned because my ex didn't trust me to return them. Why would I want to keep them after I have the digital images? Just one of the things that she has done that made no sense.
Back to the original idea, I had been working on them for almost two years trying to put them in some sort of chronological order and doing some color correction and cropping. It turned into an all consuming job but I was able to finish it.
I bought some nice DVD cases to hold the four disk slideshow of all the pictures with an additional slideshow of each individual child. I also included all the orginal images so that if they would want to print some of them, they had the files.
What made the project was that I used a picture of all the kids wearing their baseball hats we got them somewhere on vacation to Tennessee with their names airbrushed on the face of them. Jared was too little to have had one so he was the only one that didn't have it. Their faces say all that needs to be said.
Of course, I commented on The Christmas Story as one of the greatest christmas movies of all time and how I would love to have one of the leg lamps. My kids went together and bought me one. Although it is not the standard size lamp, it is just right for the table that Leslie lets me put it on. She says it can only be out on Christmas day and put away the next day. So far, it is still out on the table and my kids said they want to get me the full sized one next year. Les wasn't excited about that.
