Graduation Party For Luke!

Today we officially celebrated Luke's high school graduation!

It was so special to have both my parents as well as my Aunt Claire and Uncle Jim here to celebrate with us!

We also had my brother Dan's girls.  Elia wrote in Luke's graduation book that he was her "favorite boy cousin".  So sweet!!

We had an incredibly brief ceremony where Bob and I presented the diploma (which I had a hard time printing off because our black ink cartridge has randomly started spewing black ink all over everything, grrr), and then Bob prayed for Luke.

After that, we opened up the ice cream sundae bar, like we had for Nathan.  It's a nice thing to have in the middle of the day, and well, I love ice cream, especially with crushed Oreos, strawberries, M&Ms, chocolate sauce, etc. . . . Yum!  We also had some other munchies, like grapes and some really good roasted red pepper hummus from Sams with pita chips and pretzel thins.  Uncle Jim, Anna, and I had gone shopping at Sams on Thursday, and this was a free sample.  It was soooo good, and we pretty much polished off the entire big tub!

It was great to see so many of Luke's friends again, from so many different parts of his life!

These are some pretty special guys right here.  When we started Rivendell, our goal was that the boys would make the kind of Proverbs 27:17 friends:  "As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another." I am so thankful for these guys who have provided that encouragement and motivation over the past years!

Verity was so cute with her play phone.  Here she and Aunt Claire are having a deep phone conversation.

I made a board for Luke too, like I did for Nathan.  I had so much fun going through pictures and memories!  I actually used the same board, lol--I left the verses on, but I did take all of Nathan's pictures off.  But then several of the pictures I had used for Nathan also featured Luke, so those went back up again.  Double duty!  I did print out a ton more pictures of Luke, and I had a hard time deciding which pictures to use.  The other people enjoyed looking at all the pictures, I think.  Lots of fun memories!

And here is one last bonus picture:  Faith decided to separate the M&Ms in the bowl by color. I was quite surprised to find out it was her, because she is not what I would term "OCD" or anything remotely related to that, lol.