And how do *you* say the word "elementary"?

Time for some flagrant abuse of blog-posting privileges.  My mom wants to see Kindergarten graduation pictures, so we'll skip over Katie's birthday:

Making wishes on her butterfly cake.

Yay: it's blue!  (Katie loves all things blue. Still.)

Little Katie-Bear with her new Care-Bear.

 And then we'll skip over Matthew's first birthday.  Which we somehow didn't document very well...why do all the pictures we took of him that day involve food???

 Can't believe it's been a year!

Mmmm...that ice cream was really yummy on a really hot day.

And move right on to Kindergarten graduation, which is a surprisingly big deal here.

Also a big deal here: how do you pronounce the word "elementary?"  I grew up saying it something like "elem-en-tree", as in something that you might find at a garden nursery next to the cherry-tree and the maple-tree.  Here they say "elemen-TERRy", like a kind of fabric you'd use to make towels out of.  ("I need a quarter-yard of that elemen-terry cloth, please...")  I kind of want to snicker whenever I here it because it just sounds so strange to me, but so far have managed not to do so in front of other people.  Which is probably a good thing because we've done enough other weird things this year that the school administrators probably already have their eye on us.  

Amber and Katie share a chair.  Mom and Dad stand.  Even though we were nearly half-an-hour early the entire gymnasium had already filled by the time we arrived.  At one point they brought in more chairs and I tried to get one so Katie could have her own seat, but they said the chairs were only for adults.  Kindergarten graduation is serious business.

Speaking of serious, Robyn was seriously awesome welcoming all the families to graduation.  There were only about 8 speaking parts (and nearly 70 kids) so we were excited she got to participate!  (She did great!!)

Matthew loved all the clapping and clapped especially hard when Robyn received her certificate.  She won the "Creative Thinker Award," which is pretty fitting.  

It was actually a pretty good little program, but towards the end I think Robyn started to get a little bored.

  

I think Matthew did too, because I know for a fact Dad's ear just isn't THAT interesting.

There was a nice reception in the classroom afterwards.

This was our contribution.   When I told Bryan I'd done something with the fruit that he would think was neat, his first guess was "is it a radar?" followed by, "is it a submarine?"  I guess his Kindergarten room moms were a little more technical than we are...

Amber and Katie had fun at the party too.

Robyn has had such a great year with her amazing teacher Mrs. Barry:  I can't believe how fast it's gone!

And that is Kindergarten graduation in a really quick nutshell.  Maybe we'll manage to post something from Amber's Joy School graduation tomorrow.  (Spoiler alert: expect to see a certain watermelon turtle make an encore appearance if he doesn't get too mushy overnight. :)