Tela's Graduation!

We made a whirlwind trip to Oklahoma this weekend to see Tela graduate from high school. We didn't leave town until Friday after the kids got out of school so you can imagine it was a long 6 hour drive, which included 4 trips to Wal-Marts. You may ask, "Why 4?" Well, let me tell you. . . first, we stopped at the Bryan Supercenter Wal-Mart with the objective of buying a gift card to pay for gas (don't we all need that extra 3¢ off at the pump) and filling up the tank. Getting the gift card was no problem, but when we approached the gas pumps, it was packed AND there was a gas truck delivering gas. I had heard that it is not a good idea to put gas in your car while the truck is there filling the underground tanks so we passed on the fill up. No problem, we had enough gas to make it to Waco. The kids fell asleep so it was smooth sailing to Waco. That brings us to stop #2 - food, fuel and anti-itch medicine. We stopped at Wendy's to eat because the kids were "starving", then hopped across the street to the Supercenter Wal-Mart. I ran in to get some itch medicines for Terry and me as we were still battling poison ivy rashes while Terry filled our gas tank. All-in-all it was a smooth stop, just a little long, but on the bright side our bellies were full, our tank was full and we had stopped itching for the time being. A movie later, Nicole starts complaining about her tooth hurting. This was a loose tooth that the dentist said not to pull it yet (although that was a couple of months ago). Anyway, that leads to stops #3 and #4. We found yet another Wal-Mart where we picked up some toothache medicine and some junior strength Tylenol. We also found a few snacks which we didn't buy enough of the first time in the store so we had to go back into the same Wal-Mart a second time. Who knew that Slim Jims were so popular? We finally made it to my sister's house around midnight.

Tela's graduation was at 10 am on Saturday morning. Who has a graduation at 10 am anyway? Not to mention that she still has a week of school left to attend. Since I don't make the rules for Edmond schools, we just had to roll with it. Fortunately, Tela advised us to arrive at the Cox Center (in downtown OKC) by 9 am in order to get decent seats. Boy, traffic horrid around the convention center. She has over 400 kids in her class so you can imagine the number of cars trying to park in the parking garage. There were people completely ignoring the stop lights, while others would just cut in front of you because they were obviously in a bigger hurry than you were in. After fighting the traffic and making our way into the Cox Center, we found some decent seats. Knowing that we had to entertain 4 kids age ranged from 10-years down to 14-months for an hour before the graduation would start, we had a plan. We grabbed breakfast on the way and ate it while we waited. Worked out pretty well; and I must say, the kids were fabulous throughout the entire ceremony. The ceremony was nice. Not too much fluff and took right at two hours. Our second good plan of the day was to send Donnie and Papa home with all the kids right after Tela crossed the stage. They had zero trouble with crowds or traffic. And afterwards, when it was time for the rest of us to navigate through the crowd of people to find Tela, we did not have any rugrats slowing us down. . . I mean. . . darling angels to protect from the masses. It took wading through the entire pool of people before we finally found her. I really hope it didn't embarrass her too much that we yelled her name (there was only one Tela) and asked random new graduates if they had seen her. Of course, I would expect her to personally know all 400+ of her classmates, wouldn't you?

Tela hadn't taken her senior pictures yet, so we went out and took some nice ones with my camera. Can I just say, I love my Kodak? We took lots of shots. When it's digital there is really no limit (except the memory on your SD card). We had some of the pictures printed at Walgreen's and they turned out great. Walgreen's actually has picture packages that you can buy that are really affordable. Here are a few of my faves from this weekend.





The rest of the weekend flew by with fixing meals and playing with kids. Tela opened her graduation gifts. She seemed to like all she received. We ended up heading home a bit early on Sunday. We needed to get home before urgent care closed so Terry could see a doctor for the poison ivy which is now covering about 50% of his body. Hopefully, with the meds he is taking, he can finally shake the rash and stop itching.