Graduation Week Festivities

Rocky Vista does graduation really well. There was a formal dinner/awards ceremony that was fabulous, a military cake cutting ceremony, a BBQ party, and throw in the park play dates we had with old friends and our time in Colorado was golden.

The awards dinner. This cake was Heavenly. I will surely see it again in my dreams.

Our friend, Dan, is smart. Like he was probably in the top 10% nationally with his board score kind of smart. Anyways, Smart Dan had made some comments about passing Spencer around for holding during the dinner and I just laughed and forgot because I thought he was kidding. Then when he got up to go get one of his Smart Dan awards Janelle leaned over and said, "Sarah, can Daniel hold your baby? He really does want to, he keeps whispering to me that he wants to hold him." I about died it was so cute! Dan got to hold him for the rest of the awards. :-)

The cake ceremony. 

I had no idea what this was going to be, but I was sure hoping it actually had cake because otherwise the boys would have been sorely disappointed. It ended up being really nice and I was glad that I went. One of RVU's graduation guests was an admiral who used to be the Surgeon General of the Navy and this was one of the things he did while there. He said some meaningful things about each military branch and then had a representative from each branch cut their branches cake. Before each man cut their cake they gave the appropriate shout for their branch and the other men and women from that branch echoed it back. My favorite is the Navy's "Hoo-rah!" but I have to say the Air Force's is kind of funny. Good job Brack for sucking it up and shouting out "Air Power!" all by yourself! 

I love the respect and camaraderie these kinds of ceremonies generate. Military stuff tends to make me teary eyed.

We tried taking some pictures as a family with Jayce in his grad stuff after the cake ceremony, but we didn't produce too much on account of the kids being pretty "done" by this point in the trip.

We got a lot of this:

  

And this was probably our best one:

But, this is probably my favorite that Brack caught for us.

We had been trying to get a decent photo for fifteen minutes already. The boys kept going in and out of melt down mode because they were annoyed about having to pose for pictures, Jayce was really frustrated with the boys because it was taking so long, I was frustrated at the boys and Jayce for being frustrated, and the blood was boiling for all of us basically. This picture was when I was giving it one last "I could go punch something right now, but instead I'm going to calmly explain to the boys what we are trying to do here" goes. Jack had just crumbled to the floor in a melt down shortly before, Cameron was in the midst of whining, Jayce was close to losing his cool, and then there's Ben just giving Spencer a kiss totally unbeknownst to me.

Cameron was really disgruntled about taking pictures unless it was one that he wanted. He wanted one of just him and the flowers. It is pretty cute.

At least we got these!

Jayce's parents arrived the morning of graduation and met us at the school for some last RVU photos!

Annnnnd we're off to graduation!!