Go Class of 2013!!

My little sister-in-law flipped the tassel last night, and is now officially a high school graduate!  WAHOO Christyl!!

But I am getting ahead of myself, let's start at the beginning.  I have lots of pictures documenting her special day.

First her hair, because, seriously, hair is important.

Oh!  That picture makes me giggle.  We didn't really leave her hair like that.

After the giving of gifts, we had a lot of time to kill before the graduation ceremony.  So we ate lunch, put the kids down for naps and played a game of Beyond Balderdash.  Which I lost, miserably.

Found at funagain.com

As we were finishing up the game we realized-- WE NEEDED TO BE ON THE ROAD!  Like, 20 minutes ago.  So we rushed to get dressed, hurried out the door and scrambled into the van.  The ride was a little heated because "every other driver was deliberately getting in our way just to slow us down"-- or so it felt.  Christyl was supposed to be at the Glendale Civic Center at 4 PM to get instruction on how to "walk" and what not.  But . . . 4 o' clock came and went, 4:30 came and went and just as the clock struck 4:48 Mom and Christyl breathlessly walked through the Civic Center doors.  Ok, so maybe they weren't breathless, but it was still pretty intense.

After all that, things seemed pretty lame, sitting around waiting til 5:30, for them to open the doors.  I know I was starting to question if 5:30 was ever going to come.  I was completely unprepared for the mad dash the moment the doors were opened.  CRAZYNESS!!  AJ was in the lead and three different times he was blocked from procuring us seats.  People would appear from nowhere and dash to sit down before AJ could, or throw their purse onto the seat and one girl even jumped, JUMPED, from behind AJ and landed on the seat AJ was going for.  Mad house, I tell you.  After that AJ got a little more serious, and thankfully we found five seats, all together.

After 30 long minutes, was the presentation of the graduates. . .

On with all the "boring" graduation stuff.  Thankfully, all the talks were short and the musical numbers entertaining.  Then began the reading of names, which Samuel made extremely entertaining because he repeated every name and then would scream and cheer as loud as he could.

The big moment: Chrisyl's turn to walk across the stage and receive her high school diploma!

Now, I have to make a serious comment, this was, by far, the shortest graduation I have EVER been to.  The ceremony started at 6 and was over by 6:45.  We were all greatly impressed.

Congratulations Chrsityl!!

And to celebrate, we ate dinner at El Pollo Loco, because it is kinda a big deal in the Smith family.  Booyah!!