BREAKING NEWS...BREAKING NEWS...BREAKING NEWS...

I hate to send my brand new post to second place, especially since no one's even commented on it yet, but something amazing happened today that I need to let everyone know about!!! My sister who has resolved to post...has posted!

Check it out. (I sound like Randy -- just need to preface it with a "Yo dawg".)

Graduation Hoopla

As hard as it is for me to believe, my first baby graduates from high school three weeks from yesterday! Okay, okay, the kid turned eighteen last month...it's time. But how did that time go by so fast? Those thoughts could fill dozens of posts, but right now I wanted to give a little insight into the world of graduate's parent. Being the parent of a senior brings special challenges on top of all the other stuff. Johnny is headed to our local junior college next year, so we have not even had to go through the hours and hours of researching/applying for/choosing/applying for scholarships/figuring out how to finance...a four year college choice. I'm quite happy about enjoying the benefits of an excellent, affordable, local option. But, even though we have missed out on that gargantuan undertaking, there are plenty of extra responsibilities when the child in your home nears the end of their high school career. Several of them may impact you greatly right in the last couple of months of the school year, just as everything else is ratcheting up a notch! Included among these are the following: senioritis, grad night meetings and preparations, senioritis, graduation party, senioritis, senior trip, senioritis, senior pictures, senioritis, graduation announcements, senioritis, lifetime slide show, senioritis, graduation collage, and oh, did I mention senioritis?

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I remember experiencing senioritis myself, but like most things, the perspective you bring to it as a parent, verses the one you had as a child, makes it a whole different animal. Any way, I might do another post on praying your child actually graduates, or my experience of "Graduation on the Cheap" but in this post, my focus is the dreaded graduation collage. Just in case I have any frantic senior parents who have not put together their graduation collage for display at the graduation ceremony, I want you to know that a rather painless option does exist.

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The pictures I have included in this post are all different options for a 20" x 30" photo collage Costco offers on their "Gifts" pull down menu, for a mere $9.99. Once the pictures are uploaded to Costco Photo, you can throw together a collage in minutes containing up to 30 photos. Within your choices are the color of the background, the number of photos you choose, horizontal vs. vertical alignment, include a title or not, and width of margins between photos. To create these three options I show here, it took far less than a minute to change from one to another. BTW, I did not purchase any of them, I just had fun seeing what one would look like.

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If this sounds like a good idea to you, my advice is make sure all your photos are cropped to your liking, ready to go into a collage, before you upload them to Costco's web sight. You will notice some white borders on some of my photos -- these were from scanned pictures -- Costco's photo editing options did not allow me to crop them out because they were too small to crop any further. However, if I had actually been purchasing one of these collages, I would have taken the time to correct that with my own photo editing software.

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Unfortunately I discovered this option AFTER investing HOURS in creating my own collage. What an amazing thought, to think that I could have quickly created one of these collages in about 10 minutes and received it in the mail a week later to simply adhere to my 20" x 30" board.

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This would also be a great idea for wedding or birthday collages. They are offered in several sizes, but the largest, the 20" x 30" is the one that fits the standard graduation boards.

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Being the parent of a graduate can be quite overwhelming this time of year. Quick, affordable options for some of the extras are worth passing on!!

Our Brave Little Friend

Catie and I were down in San Jose for a speech tournament this past weekend. Scott & Michelle took our dog Beamer to park and sent me this picture, via cell phone, of our pooch socializing in the dog park. (I know it's not as exciting as the picture of Andy's discarded batteries but it made me laugh!) For those of you unfamiliar with a dog park, the main attraction for most canine friends is the opportunity to be off-leash and frolic with and sniff as many other four legged pals as you can. Beamer, however, is not terribly confident around his contemporaries. Apparently being pushed around by two cats and dressed up in pumpkin hats and dracula capes has taken a toll on his courage.

Instead of running with the dogs, Beamer made friends with this woman's chair and used her two legs as a safe vantage point to peer out and observe his peers. Funny dog.