Glad I bought that IU paper!

There are some topics which are hard to scrapbook. For us, one of those subjects has been the college selection process. Fraught with emotion, it started last summer and just recently ended. The prospect of finding the "right" college -- then auditioning AND being accepted there -- was daunting, to say the least. And then there was the part about actually making a decision...

Over the past few months, I had printed photos from our college visits, but the emotion associated with them was such that our daughter didn't want me to scrapbook them until she had made a decision. Truth be told, I could barely look at them either.

But now that a decision has been made, I'm tackling the photos of all the colleges we visited. The college selection process has been such a significant part of our life this year that it really needs to be documented -- the good, the bad, and the ugly! :-) It feels good to finally document this important stage in our lives.

I started with several pages (two of which are shown here) about the Summer Percussion Academy she attended last year at Indiana University, the school she'll be attending in the fall. This is a good example of how Bailey and I have worked together on some layouts. I started the journaling block with my thoughts, then she added her own. I made three additional pages for this camp with many photos of the percussion performance and friends, and she wrote extensive photo captions for all of them. Writing about the camp almost a year later -- after she had been accepted as a student at IU -- gave her an interesting perspective.

I also made a layout about the IU audition weekend in February. Of course, auditions were the main part of the college selection process. Thanks to Spouse (I've trained him well!), I had several camera and cell phone photos of the weekend, so I was able to make two pages about it. I'm planning to make an additional layout about the final part of the decision making process when she chose IU.

While we were in Bloomington picking her up from the camp last summer, I stopped at a scrapbook store and bought one sheet of IU paper. Now that we're Hoosiers, it looks like I'll be needing a few more sheets! :-)