Graduation

We celebrated Josh's graduation from his PhD program a little different than we thought we would.  When we bought our house, the seller was not going to budge on an April 30th closing date.  If we wanted the house, we had to close then.   We ended up closing on April 21st instead.  Because of insurance reasons, we had to be living in the house one week after our official closing date.  We packed up our apartment in Missouri and loaded our cars to leave St. Louis earlier than we originally anticipated.  We debated back and forth whether or not Josh and I would fly back to St. Louis for his graduation ceremony.  In the end, we decided just to have a party at my parents' house to celebrate this big accomplishment.  The actual ceremony wasn't a big deal to him.  I cried my eyes out.  However, I finally came to grips with it and realized that what was important to me was that we make a BIG deal out of completing this whole process.  As long as we did that, I was good to go.

A couple of days after we moved to Florida, we drove up to my Columbus to have our party.  We invited a few friends and it was super fun to have everyone together.

I prepared a little speech and it was fun to think back and remember all of the fun things we did while we lived in St. Louis.

Anna also missed her preschool graduation so we let her dress up in a cap and gown and gave a little speech about her as well.

She LOVED all of the attention!!  She walked around the room and gave everyone high fives.  She was so proud of her accomplishment and so were we.  She has done amazingly in preschool.  We can't wait to see what Kindergarten holds in store for this little princess.

Then, it was Josh's turn.  This cap and gown are from my high school graduation.  Josh felt a little silly doing this but he HAD to!  If we were missing his hooding for his PhD, then he had to fake this for the sake of my emotions.

We made sure he got high fives from everyone too.  ;-)

So proud of this man!

Our friend, Tina, let us borrow all of her FSU decorations.  She is the BIGGEST FSU fan in the world.  She had the cutest stuff.  We were really grateful to her for letting us borrow everything.  It looks like Josh graduated from FSU but really we wanted to celebrate what we're looking forward to.

Bryan and Ashley were able to come down from Atlanta.  We love living so close to everyone.  Special occasions don't have to be missed anymore because of distance.  It's awesome!

The kids were going nuts that night!  At least they are cute!

Josh got a few graduation gifts from my parents' and me, this shirt being one of them.  Garnet and Gold!!!

Here is Josh on his way to work for the first time.  He loves being able to have his own office.  Everything has been really good so far for him at work.  That makes for a happy wife.

We went up to visit him in his office a few weeks ago.  He is using this office on loan for the time being.  He should be getting his own office relatively soon.  We still loved being able to see him at school.

Here is to our new adventure!!