Summer has begun!

Yesterday my fourth child graduated from 8th grade. 

They don’t do any special ceremonies for that around these parts (although they did have a great golden scholar ceremony I’ll get to at some point), so these kids made up their own “ceremony”…in the form of a party…at our house.

(That up there is just a portion of the kids…there were a whole slew of others playing basketball and jumping on the trampoline…and in the pool when I took that pic…)
(I’m sure glad we reinforced that “bridge” to be as strong as could be…for obvious reasons 🙂
Those kids were here from when that bell rang at 12:15 right up until 10:30 at night when we finally kicked the last ones out.

 Phew, I am tired!

 But had to take a few pictures along the way.

It was a crazy afternoon/evening, but so fun to get to know more of these kids who will accompany Claire through all these coming years.

 

Not pictured was when I was a one-man show trying to barbecue hot dogs and hamburgers for that whole crew…and ran out of catsup…and had to run to two neighbors to borrow some.

A few nights before we were talking about when I graduated from 8th grade…

…which prompted pulling out my 8th grade graduation dress for Claire to model:

Oh man I thought that thing was sure a beauty.  Especially paired with my hair in a french braid crown, adorned with baby’s breath tiny white flowers….I remember feeling pretty decked out.

So we had to look up those old pictures:

 …a little closer:

Ours was this big formal affair…I had to walk down the auditorium isle linked arm in arm with an 8th grade boy I was haphazardly paired up with to get my “diploma.”  He was about six inches shorter than me with long feathered back hair.
It was awesome.
And now my FOURTH child is that age!
Not sure how that happened.
She’s pretty excited for the high school years to begin.  So glad she and Grace will get to overlap one year, and so are they. 

7 Comments

  1. Your house and backyard is like an entertaining paradise! I hope you have help when you have so many people over. Looks like so much fun for all those kids!

  2. How great that you have the ability to host that many kids having a great time! I bet this is the kind of thing you dreamed of when designing the backyard!

  3. What an amazing entertaining space that will be enjoyed by so many for so many years to come !!! It looked like she had the time of her life. So in AZ is grade 9 high school? My daughters not HS until grade 10 where we live.

  4. I know that dress what in style at the time, but truthfully, when I saw the picture of her modeling it I thought you were going to say it was her dress for TREK!! Oops! 🙂

  5. Fun day!
    Question: how do you manage/set up for success people to not destroy your personal items around the home, pool gear, etc.

    We love hosting and 99% of the time everything goes great. This last event we have 70+ ppl and oddly we had a handful of broken outdoor things afterwards. I put important things away, but I'm talking just lack of self-awareness.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *