Jack turned one last Friday (April 10th). I am still in shock that a whole year has gone by. It seemed like just yesterday we were bringing him home from the hospital, with no idea what we were doing.
We had a small family celebration on Saturday, and Jack sampled his first cake (yellow cake with vanilla frosting). He liked it fine, but didn’t manage to smear it all over himself.
Before Jack was born, I decided I wanted to take a picture of him every day for the first year, and at the end of the year I’d make a slideshow of the photos and play the song “When You Dream” by the Barenaked Ladies as the soundtrack. I used to listen to that song and fantasize about someday singing it to my own child. Now we sing it to him every night at bedtime.
Anyway, we did it! (Full disclosure: we did miss four days. Boo.) And the slideshow is ready. I also uploaded the photos to Flickr, because the photos go by quite quickly. Most of the photos have been posted to Flickr in the past.
I am very happy we managed to get so many photos, but I’m also a little relieved not to have to remember to take a photo every day. Still, making myself do that meant we ended up with a lot of great photos. Now, if we have another baby, will we manage to do it again? 
Watching the slideshow, the thing that touched me the most was how many photos there were of Jack with friends and family. I love that he was able to meet so many people.
The video seems kind of self-indulgent, like the kind of things only grandparents would be interested in, but I thought I’d post it here anyway.
WordPress won’t let me embed the video (!!) so here’s a link: http://vimeo.com/4123004
And a link to the still photos on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/cpearl/sets/72157616599534581/
Technical notes: I first tried to create the slideshow in Adobe Premiere Elements 4.0, which has a built-in slideshow feature. But it was IMPOSSIBLE. First, there is no control over sorting; it uses “Date Modified” instead of “Date Taken” so everything was in a weird order. I downloaded some shareware to make the date modified the same as the date taken, but there were still some photos incorrectly ordered. Then it kept crashing. And finally, the output wasn’t even very good.
So I switched to Windows Movie Maker, and it was MUCH easier. The only thing I had trouble with was finding the option to set the length of each photo displayed (it was under Tools–>Options–>Advanced). After that it was simple.
