Hell yeh it will be awesome XD

I think as far as children's books are concerned depending on where you are there might be "rules" to follow if you're creating school readers but I'm also completely the wrong person to advise anything as waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay back when my animation was a comic one of my beta readers really, really didn't like the fact it wasn't the standard number of pages a comic was "supposed" to have (and also wasn't long enough to be a graphic novel) XD (the others didn't mind/notice, this person was a hardcore comic fan and knew a LOT).

"This year" is entirely doable if you can get your story down and illustrated and know how to lay out stuff for print (which might be easy for you and your sister or if you have a friend that's good at that kind of thing, for me laying stuff out for print was always the longest, most tedious part of the process and I'm really glad my sister usually did it, I hated the couple of times I had to do it because she was having issues with one of the apps we were using on her computer and had to talk me through it and that sucked XD). I've passed pretty much every deadline I ever set for my project so now the answer to that question is "when it's done" ;D