Holiday Cards

I started out my holiday card project with good intentions. I found a deal on Dealpop for half off of Tiny Prints. Well, if you’re a fan of the photo card, you probably know that Tiny Prints makes the cutest ones around. I thought, “Great, the cards will be cute, I’ll insert a photo, order them in ten minutes, people will be amazed.” FOUR hours later, I was still tweaking the card. I had uploaded a total of twenty photos of four images and saved six different card projects. That means that there were five versions of the four photos I had chosen, each with a very subtle difference. Blurred edges, vintage look, color fade, cropping, my tiny once a year project had spiraled out of control. Close to midnight I took the crazy up a notch. I emailed the “chosen one” to my photographer friend to see if she could remove the Paul Frank monkey from my son’s shirt because it wasn’t meshing with the vintage background that I chose.

Why is this so important? Well, of course, it’s not. Why does it make me crazy? I blame that on being a stay at home mom. Let’s be honest, I live in a bubble. I don’t have much going on. We go on outings, I arrange play dates, and I cook dinner. There are no spreadsheets, deadlines, or office politics...just holiday cards. Stay at home moms don’t get a pat on the back by their boss. They don’t get promotions or bonuses. Nobody comes in to my house and praises my sparkling clean counter tops or my beautifully folded piles of laundry and that’s fine. It’s what I signed up for and a fair trade in my opinion. However, sometimes it feels nice to have a little recognition for a job well done (from someone other than my husband). So I obsess about my holiday cards. I think that Holiday Card #6 is a winner and hopefully my friends and family will agree and let me know. In the meantime, I’m giving myself a pat on the back