2010 Calendar Preparations Are Underway

It’s already time for me to start crafting the new DSANV (Down Syndrome Association of Northern Virginia, for those of you who are not from here) calendar. I can’t believe how quickly the last year has gone by. It’s starting to scare me—the older I get, the faster time goes by. When I was little, it just dragged on and on, but maybe that was because kids, with their short attention spans, get bored quickly and the time between fun things to do was interminable. Oh, here’s another thing--the older I get, the faster my hair seems to grow, as evidenced by my bright silver roots. I’d let it all grow out if it was a cool color, but it’s not. I’d love snowy white—that’d be cool. But the process of letting it grow out would be so painful. When do I draw the line and stop dying my hair? How can it be done, other than going to a salon and telling them, “I’d like you to dye my hair silver, please, to match the roots growing in.” Surely that would be good for a few laughs all around.

But I digress…the calendar. The way it works is I sent out a model-call message to the DSANV listserv and have been gathering names, ages and locations of prospective models (all with Ds, of course). I received names for about a month, and it’s just now tapering off. I then separated everyone into several age groups, and on April 1st or 2nd I’ll put the names for each age group into a box and pull the names of 2010’s 37 models! I get so few adult and teen submissions, however, that I’ll use all of them and not include them in a drawing. I like to have balance for the calendar. If I drew names randomly without separating by age group, we’d have 37 two or three year olds! I’ve got some professional photographers working with me to provide the sittings, free of charge, and will match models to photographers by geographic proximity, as much as possible. The sittings will take place some time between now and mid-June, and the photographers need to get their images to me by the end of June, so the layout can begin. Last year was my first experience with doing layout for anything, and boy, was I in for a surprise! It took me much longer than I had thought it would, and was much more involved than I’d ever expected. Especially when it came to color-matching borders and text with colors found in the images. It was a lot of fun, and was something I could do in my free time (whenever that was!), and not feel like I was compromising time with my family or my job. I worked with a great printer who helped me out a lot, checking and re-checking the images to make sure everything turned out just right on paper.

People had volunteered their time to help me with the project last year, but in all honesty, it would have been pretty hard to delegate bits and pieces. I felt much more in control by being methodical and working through each bit by myself. I’m so excited to see how this year’s endeavor turns out! Good luck to those of you who submitted names to me!