Thanks to all for the warm welcomes. Browsing through this thread my heart goes out to each of you with little ones who are ill. I know the feeling all too well, my oldest daughter was hospitalized twice before she was six weeks old, being 19 with a jerk for a husband (now ex but that's another story) it was a horrible thing to go through. We spent the better part of her first year at the doctor's it seemed like until they finally diagnosed her and did surgery at 13 months, thankfully the surgery worked and she hasn't had any problems since.
She is now 25 and just received her Bachelor's in education, it has been a long hard struggle for her. She went to her first two years of college right after high school, then in her Junior year my mom took ill and it pretty well tore the family up. She passed away from Breast Cancer, my daughter ended up failing all her classes and became a single mom. After my grandson was born she decided it was time to pull herself together and went back to school.
Now working full time and raising a baby it took her longer to finish. School starts here in August and she was starting her student teaching and had only one class to take and she would be done. Two weeks after school started along came Katrina, she was so proud of the way she had decorated her classroom and had spent hours and hours working on it. Her instructor had not even been there to see it yet. Here's a picture of the school entrance afterwards, the light at the end of the hall is there because the walls are not.
Here classroom only had one wall left.
Her college didn't fair any better as it was right on the beach. Well the college was a branch of another school in a town north of here so her records were safe, they were able to finish there classes in a local high school at night, and the best part of all the teacher she was student teaching for had taken photos of the room and put together an album for her to take to her instructor. They shared classrooms with the high school for a couple of months until their trailors were set up for classes.
Fast forward to now, since her college was a Baptist college and only a branch of the bigger one they always had their graduation ceremony in the local Baptist church, one look at the picture below explains why they can't have it there.
So they were invited to attend the main colleges graduation and be recognized, and only be able to invite a limited number of people.
After all that she has been through that just wasn't good enough for me, so I'm planning a reception for her to give everyone a chance to congratulate her. Any decorating ideas will be gladly accepted, I was thinking about doing the school motif with apples, books, etc. If anyone has any fav recipes for
appetizers I would love some new ideas.
Sorry to go on and on,
Hope you all have a good night.
P.S. J&N's mom, that's the reason for the Congratulations Tara, the Disney trip is our graduation gift to her.