Graduation

So, I keep waiting to post so that I can put up some pictures to match the text, but maybe if I do the two separately, I'll actually get something up here. (Max's birthday will be a separate post)

Graduation day was incredibly busy, started with a bit of frustration, but ended perfectly.

Here was our schedule for the day:

9:15: Rich to take Tim and Sam to sign Tim up for baseball
9:45: Rich and two boys to baseball field for sammy's game from 10-12.
10:00: Elana to leave with Max to finish errands
10:05: Elana swear up and down under her breath because Max lets the dog get loose (I left anyway)
11:30: guests start to arrive for Max's family birthday party (most of the party was spent trying to get the filthy dog
1:05 start kicking people out so that we can leave for graduation
2:15: arrive at Bentley to get ready for graduation (Rich had to truck all the way across campus with the boys and his parents by himself)
3:10: graduation starts
5:15: graduation ends
6:00 we arrive at dinner at the teppanyaki place
6:05: I have my first scorpion bowl of the night
8:30: arrive home and get everyone in bed... phew

Dinner was absolutely fabulous, everyone got along, my kids behaved, we all ate great food. I do have to say, I think that was the best part of the day!

Some realizations about the difference between graduating with your bachelors and your masters (as an adult):

1. You don't cry because you are leaving your friends, you cry because your children are cheering for you and their huge smiles just melt your heart

2. You don't smile because of the gifts your getting or the big party you'll have, you smile because you and your spouse survived

3. You spend much of the ceremony worrying that your children are going to drive your parents crazy, only to find out that they were so well behaved, people didn't even know children were in those seats.

4. You don't take for granted that your grandparents are in the audience cheering for you, you are thrilled that your Gram is there with tears in her eyes and are sad that the rest of your grandparents are watching from heaven

5. You look forward to "free time" in both cases, but free time now really just means you have time to pick up the things that got neglected while you were doing homework... like playing with your kids.

All in all, I'm glad that we both did it (Congrats, honey! You are a stronger man for having survived this :-*) We are better off for it, but can tell you that the only homework I'll be working on in the future will be with my kids!