MovieMaker, Anyone?

As noted below, I took a week long break from blogging to "engage in some Real Life pursuits". That included catching up on overdue paperwork that I owed my supervisor, assembling a new bookcase, doing loads and loads of laundry, and blowing my nose incessantly as I fought my way through a really bad cold. Turns out that Real Life is just not that exciting, at least not for me. I mean, Jeez, I didn't even catch something cool and trendy like swine flu. It was just a plain old cold.
Now I'm busy trying to create a photo slideshow for my mother's 70th birthday party this Sunday. At first, I planed on sending all the pictures that I collected to a guy we know and having him assemble them into a slideshow. But after realizing that I have three different audio/video programs on my computer, I decided to try to do it on my own. I chose to use Windows MovieMaker. I want to add songs from our I-Tunes library, text in the beginning and the end, and some simple special effects. Since this is my first time doing this, I'm still trying to puzzle out the directions, and I can use some guidance. If anyone out there is familiar with MovieMaker, please drop me some helpful hints in the comments!