Oh! The Places You'll Go!

As each of the kids has graduated from high school, I've given them an album in which I've tried to capture their time in high school and middle school.  I've tried to make it fun, with varying degrees of success.

With the oldest child, who is a mathematician, I kept his album very tidy and orderly.  Straight line, Freshman, Sophomore, Junior, and Senior year, with the pictures for each year and each activity neatly aligned.  Being the oldest child, he was also the one who tried to do EVERYTHING in high school, so he had a lot of activities to encapsulate.

Middle Child was more of a challenge in some ways.  He's very creative, but he likes order in the midst of his creativity.  And he's still very playful.  For him, I made an ABC book.  Yeah, it sounds easy, doesn't it?  Try coming up with words and pictures to match every single letter of the alphabet.  Some of it was easy - like "L" for Liberty or "R" for Robotics.  Some of it was extremely challenging - "G" and "X" come quickly to mind.  It took me 4 months to get his album put together.

And then, there is youngest child.  Hers needed to be the most creative.  She is a very creative soul in the first place.  She's going to an art school, so I felt the pressure to step up my game and make hers unique to her and creative.  Originally, I was going to try to do something with her favorite childhood book- Harold and the Purple Crayon (Purple Crayon Books).  After reading that book, I realized THAT was not going to happen.  I might be creative, but I'm not THAT creative!

So, I finally decided to remake the book Oh, The Places You'll Go! by Dr. Seuss.  I thought that this would be easy!  Yeah, right.  I honestly should have left it to the master himself, Dr. Seuss.  Anyway, I gave her the album on Saturday during her graduation party.

I don't know how much of a keepsake it is, or how creative and wonderful it is, but it does have an awful lot of memories shoved into one little book!

The album.  I found a 3 ring binder album at Hobby Lobby.  Love the 3 ring binder!  It made it so easy to add pages, and move them around at will!

My cover page.  Not even close to the quality of work done by Dr. Seuss.  How do you like the stick figure?  I don't know if you can tell from the picture, but on the right hand side, I credited the "Words by Dr. Seuss" and below that "Pictures by... "and listed the names of every person who had taken a picture that I used in the book.

Look at that... Hand written card.  All of the words from the original book are hand written.  Yes, when I was about halfway through the book, I was wondering what I was thinking by writing all the words out by hand...

"You're too smart to go down any not so good street".  I don't know if this is a good street or not, but it ends up in the river, and we were trying to find Central Park when we landed here.  So, definitely NOT a good street for us!

I want you to take a close look at those album pages.  This is the second time I've used these, and I really like them.  The pages have pockets in them, and the pockets were made to just slide the pictures right in.  No cropping involved.  While this is easier, I'm not certain that I'm in love with the layout.  I'd like a little bit more white space between the pages.