I Love Shutterfly

This past summer someone at work asked if I wanted to see photos from her trip to India.  When I walked in her office, she handed me a book with a photo of the Taj Mahal on front that looked like something you'd purchase.  I was confused momentarily--why would she show me a bunch of store-bought photos?  But as I started looking I realized they were photos she had taken, assembled in a beautiful, professional-looking book.  I had no idea you could do that--she explained that she used a web-based site called Shutterfly.  We had been to Hawaii a few months previously, and I thought using Shutterfly would be a great way to capture the photos in a real, not just virtual, album.  I had loaded the photos onto iphoto, but hadn't done anything with them.

Took some time to get the hang of Shutterfly, but I managed to create two beautiful books of our Hawaii photos.  Then I had a real brainstorm.  It's become a Christmas tradition for me to buy my son two wall calendars each year--one of black labs and one of ginger cats, in honor of our pets.  Even though I'm the one who changes the calendar each month, he says he still wants them each year--family traditions are important to him.  I was so excited to think that I could make my own wall calendars for 2013 using Shutterfly--one with photos of Raven and one with photos of Pooh.

I went through every single photo we have (in a huge box) and found every photo of Raven and of Pooh, and also of our late cat Casey.  I scanned them onto a disk (my husband bought me a scanner, which I hadn't  used much), loaded them onto the computer, and transferred them to Shutterfly.  I spent weeks over the summer doing this--I wanted to have a lot of time to think about the calendar layout.  By the end of the summer I had created the two calendars, but figured I wouldn't order them until sometime in the fall, when there was a sale on calendars.

It never crossed my mind when I was working on the calendars that Raven wouldn't live to see 2013.  I never imagined life without her, let alone next year.  Within a week of her death, I decided to create a memory book of Raven for my husband's birthday, which is in a few weeks.  Because I had already looked through all the photos and loaded them onto Shutterfly, it wasn't difficult to create a book.  I'm so grateful I had those photos on Shutterfly--it would have been so difficult to go through all our photos now.  So thank you for being there, Shutterfly.

I ordered the book, and also went ahead and ordered both calendars.  They came out beautifully.  I just am not sure what to do with the Raven 2013 calendar.  I don't think I'll wrap it--I'll let my son know I have it, and if he wants to put it up in his room he will.  If not, I'll keep it in a safe place.