Graduations!!!

My middle child is graduating from college later this week.

Youngest child is graduating from the community college today.

I've got family literally crawling all over the house!

Oldest child has been home for a week now, and I have been the happiest of mommies!

I'm taking a break this week - I'll start posting again after Memorial Day.

Believe me, I've got a ton of things to say and share, but for now - I want to spend my time and energies with my kiddoes!  They'll all be off and back to their own adventures soon enough.

If you've got the time this week, please keep little Coquito from Life in Amy's World in your prayers.  He's been in the hospital for almost a month now with chemo treatments, secondary infections, low blood counts, low platelets... the list just goes on.  To top it all off, his Daddy was admitted to the hospital with pneumonia.  Please keep them all in your prayers.  It's been a rough couple of months for them.

Graduation Pictures

I don't know who was happier to hit the graduation ceremony on Thursday night - the kids, the parents, or the teachers!  

Needless to say, we are very proud of our daughter.  She graduated with an unweighted 3.97.  Not too shabby!  She also received a pin (the black one in the picture below) for being one of the top ten earners of Service Learning Hours in her class.  She had almost 900 service learning hours for her high school career.  The Gold and Silver pin below are the President's Volunteer Service Award (As in President of the United States of America), recognizing her outstanding service.  She wore these pins, along with her Girl Scout Gold Award on her graduation gown.

 

Honors Cord, and pins.

Speakers addressing the crowd. 

 

The graduates celebrate at the end of the ceremony!

Honors Cord,Tassel, and her volunteer recognitions.

It was a grand ceremony.  And also, a relief.  This marks the end of my association with the public schools.  I love our schools.  They do a fantastic job of educating our children.  Over the years, we've had some fantastic teachers who I will forever love and respect, and we've had a handful that I will go to any lengths to avoid in the grocery store.  (Less than 5, so I'm fortunate, really.)

Daughter and her Dad are off on her graduation trip.  We have always taken our kids away for a week after graduation to any destination East of the Mississippi River for them to explore.  Oldest child went hiking along the Appalachian Trail with Dad.  Middle Child and I went to New York City.  And daughter?  They are spending a week hiking in Upstate New York.  

Congratulations to the class of 2015!

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.