To make up for my lack of pictures lately, I have tons of them this week! Of course, it was a week with a couple of fairly significant events...and a lot of celebrating. I will try to keep the words at a minimum and let the photos do most of the talking.
Back to the end of last week...Seth was sick last week but by Thursday / Friday was feeling a lot better. However, on Saturday I noticed he had a rash! I think it actually started on Friday. He still had a fever, too, although it was not very high. Meanwhile, Frank woke up Saturday not feeling well at all. So Seth and Frank stayed home from church on Sunday. The rash was mostly gone by late Sunday so Seth was able to go back to school on Tuesday.
Frank continued to feel pretty crummy through Monday but thankfully he did not get as sick as Seth and he recovered a lot quicker. He took Tuesday off but was able to go back to work on Wednesday. He has been working from home all week though because on Wednesday and Thursday he had meetings at the Frederick location and today he had to meet a guy from Comcast at the church to take care of a problem with the modem. (Turns out both the modem and the firewall were fried by a storm we had this week.)
On Saturday Jared went to a practice for a film that the youth in the stake are making for youth conference. I kept busy with the usual things, plus taking care of Frank and Seth. Sunday I had the usual meetings and choir practice. We were going to have friends for dinner but had to cancel since Seth and Frank were sick.
Monday was Memorial Day, of course, and our ward had a service activity followed by a picnic. Since Frank was still not very well we skipped the service part and I would have probably skipped the picnic part too except Jared really wanted to go. Oh, and I guess Tanner helped a little...he helped load tables and chairs at the church to be taken to the picnic location. So anyway, Jared and I went to the picnic for about an hour and a half. I did enjoy it...had some nice visits with other ward members and the food was really good. Jared also sat down with another ward member who is a merit badge counselor and passed off the rest of the requirements for Citizenship in the Community so he can get that badge at the Court of Honor next week.
After getting home from that I drove Tanner over to a graduation party for two of his friends (well actually Tanner drove; I was the required licensed driver in the other front seat). Then I went back later to pick him up. After dinner I took him to another party...this time for YSAs. (He didn't stay very long at that one, though. Said there were too many desperate singles acting artificial!) None of these places were particularly nearby, so I felt like all I did most of the day was take people places! I was pretty tired by the end of the day, especially since in between all of that I had to help Seth get a project for school done. I originally planned to get it done last week but then he was sick all week. It was due on Tuesday so we had to get it done on Monday. I also fit in a trip to the grocery store and we did laundry. We did have a nice picnic style dinner--Frank was well enough to grill some hot dogs and hamburgers, and we also had chips, watermelon, baked beans, and potato salad. Seth ate outside on the deck (Tanner went out with him too) but it was too warm & humid for the rest of us. It would have been ok if the deck were in the shade, but it was in full sunlight.
On with the celebrations! Tuesday was Tanner's graduation. We got him a few presents:
(That's a Leatherman...a cool multi-purpose tool.)
And a razor, since he's been using Frank's ever since his last one broke. He's going to need his own now that he will be leaving home soon!
Those are some "Class of 2014" sugar cookies in front. He also really appreciated the card & gift card from Grandma & Grandpa!
Seth wanted to try on Tanner's cap & gown:
Jared stayed home with Seth while Frank and I went to the graduation ceremony that evening. On the way there we drove through a huge thunderstorm. I have NEVER seen rain come down like that, and I've seen some pretty major storms in my day. Visibility was practically zero and we could feel our car rocking in the wind. Thankfully that only lasted about 5 minutes, and we made it to the graduation ceremony safely. It was held at an arena at a college about a half hour from here--Mount Saint Mary's.
I really like that their mascot is the Patriots and that their school colors are red, white, and blue! (And look at all those diplomas stacked on the table.)
Thanks to the new camera, we got much better pictures of Tanner's graduation than of Scott's (which was held at the same arena). I was surprised, once again, at how emotional I felt. Just really proud of Tanner and excited for him. Everyone got excited, actually. When the graduates started walking in, it was similar to the feeling at a football game when your team has just scored an amazing touchdown! And everybody was cheering just as loudly as they would for something like that, too. Here they come:
(Does the girl on Tanner's left look familiar? Yes, she was his date to the Prom last week.)
National Anthem being sung:
The girl who sung it has a beautiful voice and did a great job except...she inadvertently skipped a whole stanza! As in "...at the twilight's last gleaming. And the rockets' red glare..." She was singing acapella, so it wasn't obvious and didn't matter too much. :)
The program was mercifully short and sweet (but nice), and then it was time to award the diplomas. Tanner was in the second row, so we didn't have to wait long for his turn:
After everyone was done, they all threw their hats in the air (I feel totally gypped that they wouldn't let us do that at my high school graduation) and Tanner couldn't find his! He did come home with a cap and tassel, but not the one he started out with. He used the same cap Scott did, so somewhere out there, someone in his graduating class has a cap that says "Scott Cleveland" inside. Oh well!
They do a kind of fun & unique recessional as the graduates march out...they have two rows of graduates coming from both sides and when they meet in the middle to go down the aisle, they can do whatever they want to greet the person coming from the other way...slap hands, hug, dance, whatever. They have them seated so that the person they meet in the middle is a friend of their choice (but has to be the same gender). Anyway, I knew Tanner had a partner but when he got to the middle there was no one there so he did this fun deep bow all by himself. I asked him afterwards what happened to his walking partner and he said "He's in the drum line. We didn't think about that until right before the ceremony started." (The drum line plays the music for the recessional.) It was funny though because the two girls right behind him ran up to him as he marched out and each one grabbed him by one of his arms, so he had two "partners" walk out with him.
Here we are outside afterwards...it took us a while to find Tanner in the mob:
(They each receive a white rose with their diploma, for the other school color.)
The gold cord is for NHS. Tanner left it in the car by accident and I made Frank walk all the way back to the car to get it...after all the grief I went through nagging Tanner to get his service log in (and worrying that he wouldn't) I was determined that he have a way to show at graduation that he was in NHS! Frank also accidentally left the camera in the car so he had to walk back to get it too. (He got the camera first and then Tanner discovered that his NHS cord was missing after he got back.)
Anyway, we are proud of Tanner for graduating and with highest honors, no less! After all the stress we've had over some of his grades, his weighted GPA ended up being 4.2 something and his unweighted was 3.6 something. So not too bad! He got something called the Maryland Scholar Award as well.
After pictures, Frank and I headed home. Tanner stayed there...they have an all night "safe and sane" party there at the college that they can go to with swimming and lots of other activities. Tanner had clothes to change into but he forgot to bring casual shoes so he went barefoot all night. They had buses that brought them all back to the school the next morning...Frank picked him up shortly before 6:00 am. He said he had fun but would have liked to sleep part of the time. He went right to bed when he got home but much to my surprise he was up again around 11:00...said he woke up and couldn't go back to sleep. It was just as well, since that helped him get back onto a normal day / night schedule rather quickly.
I had a busy day, baking a cake and wrapping presents, along with all the usual things. As soon as Seth got home from school we let him open presents. Then we had pizza for dinner and cake. Pictures of that celebration:
Card from Grandma & Grandpa
Dart gun (not sure what I was thinking)
A dinosaur / race car transformer thing
A set of all the Star Wars movies (yep, he was really excited about that one!) He asked for Return of the Jedi because our copy broke, but I could only find it in a set of 3 or a set of all 6. Since at least one of our copies of one of the other movies in the series was on VHS, I decided to just invest in the complete set. After I bought it (last week) Seth tried to watch one of the other movies and it kept glitching, so I was glad I decided to get them all.
A Star Wars Lego set
Art set
Batman dress up set
We had to do the celebration kind of quickly because Tanner and Jared had an awards ceremony for Drama Club. For the first time in 14 years they didn't do any awards for technical theater, so that was kind of lame but Jared did get a letter for drama (Tanner already got one last year, so he got a pin for his letter):
If that weren't enough excitement for two days, we also had some excitement of the anxious kind. Wednesday morning Frank got a call from his sister because his dad was in the hospital...they thought he might have had a stroke. So of course we were really worried about him! He went in the hospital Tuesday evening because he had a really bad migraine headache and the doctor there thought there was a possibility of a stroke so he had him transferred to the hospital in Ashville. After doing a bunch of tests on him they decided that he had not had a stroke...it really was just a bad migraine. It took them until Thursday to decide that, though so he didn't come home until last night. Glad that ended so well!
After all of that, Thursday was nice and calm, with just the usual things to do. Soccer practice even got cancelled because it was raining again. Most of the week has been quite warm and humid (shorts weather) but Thursday the temperature dropped about 20 degrees so we were back in pants and jackets. Tanner went to Institute Thursday evening for the first time.
In between all of the celebrating, I did get a few things done for RS...mostly phone calls and such. I also had book chat on Tuesday. I didn't finish the book but we had an interesting discussion, and I have continued to read it. I really do want to finish it...I just got to the part where the war actually starts, finally.
Today I am planning to visit a few people for RS and we are having the Sister missionaries over for dinner. Also trying to find someone to dog sit for us while we are on vacation. There are tons of things like that to get done in the next 10 days but we are really looking forward to seeing the family!
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