98 Caramels: Graduation!

We're in the final countdown to the end of the school year, just one more week.

And nothing says Let's Get Ready for Summer! like a Memorial Day Weekend blizzard:

Yes, we were still skiing. (This time we brought Marcello) I overheard another parent telling his kids they had gotten 7 months of use out of their season passes. I suppose we could have pushed on for 8, but have too many places to go in June. Also, the ski boots that fit fine in October 2018 have become a pretty tight squeeze.

The last Friday of the school year is Egg Drop Day. The kids wanted to stick with the parachute theme, although this year were not entirely in compliance with the "eco-friendly materials" theme. (It was a pretty busy time, and I decided that re-using/re-purposing a Target bag was close enough. So report me to the Lazy Parenting Police.) (although if we DID have more time, I would have loved to make a tiny sensory deprivation tank, like in Stranger Things, and see if the keeping the egg afloat on very salty water would work. Sigh. Lucie still has 3 more years, so maybe next time...)

Anyhoo...Brennan's perfect record cracked this year, figuratively and literally - his egg looked intact, but was oozing from a small defect. He was unfazed & enjoyed smashing the egg to bits; also his classmates finally stopped accusing him of using a hard-boiled egg. Lucie's design was very similar, but the use of moss for padding proved a superior design, and her egg survived:

There was a brief scare were I agreed to take on the task of end-of-elementary-school portraits, which sounded both tedious and terrifying. Luckily someone else came through in the 11th hour - but I didn't like Brennan's official portrait as much as I liked the one I took while I figuring out if I could even do the class photos. So here it is:

And while I was scouting locations around school for portraits, I put Lucie to work, too.

And then the big day arrived - Tuesday June 4th, Graduation Day and the Last Day of School. We decided to end the year in the spirit we began: Disorganized & Barely In Time. We made a last minute decision to have one more Boulangerie breakfast, scrambled to be on time, ate breakfast out of bags, and realized we forgot to get a photo about a block from school. So here's the graduation outfits (younger siblings are allowed to skip class and attend), in front of some stranger's garage on Cole St. Given the vivid green cupcake frosting we would soon encounter, it was a pretty brief window of respectability.

Between the auditorium lighting, our seating position, and my dropping my glasses somewhere on the school yard, documenting the ceremony was difficult to say the least. But to sum up, it was serious enough to make the 5th graders feel important, but still fun, not too long, Lucie abandoned us to sit with her friends, Brennan seemed proud, and I just cried twice, for a minute or so.

It turned out to be one of those miraculous rare days, where Karl the Fog has business to attend to far out to sea, and it was sunny but just breezy enough, and it was lovely to be outside everywhere in San Francisco. And we would know, as we were outside at the 9:30 am post-graduation cupcake reception in the Grattan courtyard, the unofficial last-day-of-school afternoon gathering at the Park Chalet out at Ocean Beach, and the Class of 2019 Party at The Ramp, a former bait shop-turned-waterfront restaurant on the San Francisco Bay.

But if every day was like this, there'd be no keeping people out.

The party at the Ramp was quite the event (100% thanks to Harlan's mom, a professional event planner), with festive decor, appetizers, dinner, a self-serve candy bar for the kids (bad idea), a cash bar for the adults (probably a worse idea), a dance floor and parent DJ, and, god help us, a photo booth. For which I have to admit responsibility, because in my immense relief over not having to take 5th grade portraits, I agreed to find, book, and pay/fund raise for it.

We usually like to celebrate the end of school with a little trip, sometimes just a day to someplace fun, like the Coppola Pool in Sonoma, or a family weekend in Truckee. But it's not every year you leave your beloved elementary school, so I decided to raise my game this time, and planned a weekend in Santa Cruz.

There was hotel pool time