Father and Daughter

I made a DVD for Grant for Father's Day with a bunch of pictures of Eleanor put to music. To be honest, I gave it to him a couple weeks late because I overdid it, and I'm such a perfectionist I couldn't give it to him until it was just how I had envisioned it. Plus, I had been begging him routinely for months to bring home all our picture files that were stored on his work laptop (because we were afraid our desktop hard drive could crash at any moment, so we didn't trust it), and he didn't comply with my requests until less than a month before Father's Day, leaving me with no time to accomplish what I wanted.

Anyways, I mentioned I overdid it. My sister and her husband have put together really cute DVDs of their kids with pictures and video put to music to document baby's first year, etc. I have always wanted to do something like that, but I didn't have the programs or a DVD burner until I got my laptop. As a consequence, Grant's Father's Day DVD ended up being a combo Eleanor's first 18 months / Father's Day DVD. The entire thing is about 20 minutes long and includes:

• a short video of Eleanor saying, "Happy Father's Day," with my help.
• pictures and a song for her first 6 months (and, I'll be honest again, I loved the baby pictures so much and had such a hard time ruling them out that I repeated the song once so I didn't have to cut out pictures or make them flip by too quickly)
• pictures and a song for the next 6 months (basically- it ends at Christmas, which is actually few months after her birthday).
• a short video from January of Daddy playing chase with Eleanor before her bedtime
• pictures and a song for the time from Christmas through May of this year
• an arrangement of daddy/daughter pictures set to music
• and finally, a song with pictures that are mostly close-ups and funny faces of Eleanor (I noticed we had a lot of them since she's always been inclined to make a B-line for the camera, and I've always been inclined to snap a picture once she gets to me and is smiling sweetly, begging to touch the camera.

Ha! And you didn't believe me when I said I overdid it! I showed you! Oh well. I found that I was a bit limited by the computer programs we did/didn't have, and I hope to improve on that if we ever get the money. I wasn't able to add video clips to any of the music collages I did, and I would have liked to do that, even though it just would have made editing that much more difficult for me. I also wasn't able to put a picture of my choice on the DVD menu like I would have wanted or have a "play all" function on the menu. Another oh well. Maybe someday we'll have the right programs to do it.

The point of all my ramblings was to introduce this clip I thought I would share from it (in case anyone is interested). It's probably my favorite of the songs I did. It's the daddy/daughter one. I suppose if anyone wants to see it, I could post other installments of Grant's DVD (or you could just come over sometime and see the whole thing). But if I haven't lost you after all my babbling, here's Father and Daughter:

The last picture is a bit hard to see, but she's wearing a hat that says, "Dad's Little Flutterbug."

(p.s. Special thanks to Shonda for the amazing pictures of Eleanor- I'm sure they stand out from the ones I've taken)