Father’s Day Surprises: My Fabulous Gift That Flopped.

So our very first Father’s Day in the history of our new little family was super-fun but semi-fabulous. Although our main gift of much-needed summertime ‘dad’ clothes and yummy breakfast went off without a hitch, the big wham-bam finish for my Dad’s Day plan fell flat… all because my printer decided to act like a bitch.

Behold my bright idea for a memorable first Father’s Day: An 8×10 picture of Hubby’s 2 favorite gals especially assembled for the blank walls in his office at work. Brilliant, right? I coordinated taking pictures of LadyP and me months ago with the sole intention that it serve as a surprisingly special ‘First Father’s Day’ gift (the side-effect was the profile picture for this blog). All I have to do is print the image out at home (with the fabulous photo printer we have) and I’m done. Easy! This is why we bought this fabulous printer! Right? Wrong. My Saturday evening consisted of screaming at said fabulous printer and coming this close to throwing it out onto our quiet neighborhood street and running it over with my car over and over in a mad, wild rage. Yes, it was that bad. At the eleventh hour, my precious photo would not print without color streaks, lines and/or missing images. (Nevermind that I waited until the last minute to do this… I’m a working first-time/new mom, remember?)

Over and over, I loaded the photo paper, fooled with the settings, pressed ‘print’ and was delivered a mess of an idea. It took me almost 2 hours (and countless pieces of wasted glossy paper with missing faces and/or appendages submitted to the trash can) to understand that my bright idea was doomed. The ONLY thing that Miss Bitchy Printer seemed to agree to was to print a black & white version of my photo onto regular (non-glossy) paper. She and I are still not friends 2 days later.

Stuck without any options, I had no choice but to print LadyP and me onto some flimsy paper (in black & white), frame it and wrap it up as though I meant to do it that way. Hubby opened it, loved it and was totally oblivious that it wasn’t even a ‘real’ photo until I confessed my frustration about it’s UNfabulousness. Then, like any good Dad, he said “Well let’s fix it!” What followed was almost 2 hours of him fiddling, futzing, and finally phoning the tech support dude to find out why the heck our printer wouldn’t print color photos! (Turns out the damn thing had a broken part… which is promptly being sent to us as we speak to prevent future disasters like this from happening in the near future.)

Thanks to Hubby’s tenaciousness, we solved the mystery of the color-printer that refused to print in color. That’s the funny thing about great dads: No matter how fabulous of a mom you are, you gotta give credit to the person who actually helps you get there and enables things to happen – according to your vision – on a daily basis.

Happy FIRST Father’s Day to my Hubby! (Yes, YOU are fabulous.)