Graduation

 (published 1/11/23)

Cat's good friend Aidan photographed her for her graduation announcements. They had a short session up on the Alpine Loop and the pictures fit her personality so well! It was fun to play around with the announcements a little bit too, trying to paint an accurate picture of Cat's high school experience as concisely as possible.

Liza and Luke helped prepare announcements for mailing.

Cat included handwritten notes with a few of her
announcements, mostly to close friends and teachers.

{pictures we didn't use for the announcements}

Graduation Day was pretty awesome. The ceremony was at 1:00 in the afternoon at The Show Barn at Thanksgiving Point. We arrived early enough to have our pick of seats, and avoid any unnecessary stress for Madame Valedictorian.

One of the best things about the ceremony was that Cat was seated on the stage beside her best friend Janie, who was Senior Class President. I only teared up once during graduation: Janie got me. During her speech, she mentioned every single person in the class, pointing out things that made them special. And she saved Cat for last. And it was so sweet and absolutely lovely.

Cat did a great job on her speech. She was confident and poised, and had good pacing. I loved how she talked about a common experience for all of her class, learning the lesson of adaptability (Covid) as freshmen, appreciation for education as sophomores, grit as Juniors, and finding balance/gaining perspective and allowing yourself to have fun as seniors. It was wonderful.

I tried to embed the video via YouTube but after repeated attempts to upload the video, I've given up. Click HERE to watch it on Google Photos.

As I was walking outside after graduation, I talked to a Latin teacher and he said, "Congratulations to Cat... for winning... everything," which made me laugh.

We took pictures for a little while, but once it started raining, one by one we made our way to the car to take shelter, as did the rest of the well-wishers and graduates. Except Cat. She and Robert were the last two students left. I think he walked away first, so she was actually the very last one there - an appropriate reflection of how she feels about her time at Maeser, and her classmates.

After the ceremony we went to a nice Italian restaurant in the Riverwoods Mall called La Jolla Groves. We were a group of 9 and they ended up giving us a private room - we hadn't reserved one, but either because the restaurant wasn't very busy or because they were afraid that we would be noisy, they gave us one anyway. It was the right move. We were definitely noisy. And the boys were definitely antsy. And it was nice to have a place to just talk and laugh and have fun and let Cat open her presents.

Cat had such a wild and crazy night after dinner that when I asked her at the time of writing how many parties she attended, she couldn't remember. Maybe three? Maybe just two? She knows she fell asleep at at least two parties, so there's that. The second place she fell asleep, she'd arrived at 5am. And that is when curfews became a thing of the past. Welcome to adulthood!

Side note: Many thanks to Coach Call who took the higher-quality pictures included here from graduation and shared the with me!