Graduation Party

It's hard to believe that my little girl is a senior, and will be graduating with her class in less than a month. The month next is chock full of graduation related and end-of-school-year activities, not the least of which was a graduation party for Julia.

McKenzie Brew House - downstairs

We were a little late deciding what we wanted to do, and opted for renting out the downstairs of McKenzie Brew House, a nice place very close to home. Timing was difficult, as many of her friends already had graduation parties on the calendar, and finding a date that would't overlap with too many of her "important" people's parties and other events wasn't easy. We ended up with Friday May 19, and were one of the earlier parties.

Julia and BFFs

McKenzie's did a really nice job, with good food, good desserts and a full bar (yay for the adults). We brought a cake of our own and set up a "make a takeaway bag" candy bar. People seemed to enjoy that.

Cake!

The party ran from 6pm until 10-ish, and we had a great turnout of Julia's classmates (especially from the drama club), kids from her classes, teachers from throughout the years, and of course family and friends of the family. In all we had about 75 people in and out over the course of the evening, a core group of which stayed for most of that time. Even a couple of Julia's best friends from last year were back from college to attend.

Grace and friend with selfie silliness

One of the great treats for me leading up to the party (other than that we didn't have to do much of the work!) was in putting together a slide show of pictures of Julia from throughout the years. McKenzie's had a few large screen TVs on walls around the room, and were set up to plug a laptop into and play whatever we wanted. Making the slide show was a wonderful trip down memory lane, and had the side benefit of finally forcing me to do something I had been meaning to do for a very long time - get all the digital photo history of our family gathered together in one place. It has always been my fear that an old computer will fail, or a backup hard drive will get corrupted, and with it will go every picture from several years of our life. We don't print many hard copies of pictures anymore.

Anyway, the slide show grow to the point that it had about 200 pictures and ran for about 20 minutes. It looped all evening, and got rave reviews.

All told, Julia had a great time being the center of attention, and the party was a complete success.