Big days, part 1

I should be sleeping. Instead I am making dinner for a friend who just had a baby. It's a joyful insomnia. It's easy to feel joyous. I have much to celebrate, and for now, I can choose not to dwell on the trials and tribulations around the bend. They'll intrude soon enough.

I am particularly proud of the fact that I made it through the challenges that piled up, one after another, in a week replete with celebrations. The first was my baby's birthday party. I suppose at four, it's inappropriate to call her a baby, but as my youngest, I'm afraid it's a moniker that will follow her into her adult life. After all, I'm still my mother's baby at 40.

This was my little one's first real birthday party.

We held it at the ballet school, yet again. For her, it was a dream-come-true. She dressed in the fairy costume Granma Thuthin made her, blew out the candles atop the homemade cake, and danced like lunatic for a full hour, while daddy ran out to put together goody bags. 

Best of all, she was surrounded by her best friends.

The party was absolutely adorable.

The kids giggled and played, and lived up to their gender stereotype. While the dance teacher sang out the instructions, the girls listened patiently while the boys ran laps around the studio.

Days after we celebrated four years of my sweet abundance of life, it was time to turn our attention to the culmination of our Chicago experience, my husband's law school graduation.

Before we could get the partying started, we had to deal with some logistical issues, like preparing an empty home to be inhabited by my parents, my grandmother, and my family for a week. I am so blessed to have made an amazing friend who was generous enough to move to a new home the week of graduation, leaving her old house ready for a South Texas invasion. She lent it to us not only to sleep in, but to host a party in, as well.

My husband and I set out borrowing beds from another dear and generous friend, moving sheets, pillows, towels, blankets, sleeping bags, table and chairs into the house. I then began the extensive shopping and cooking for Shabbat and a party. I was barely human by the time everyone arrived. Yet, somehow, we pulled it off. In fact, it was a pleasure, a real labor of love.

The week leading up to graduation was filled with events and parties for the graduates and their families. My husband took his mom to the "Last Lecture". I would have loved to have been there to hear the uplifting words of opportunity and gratitude, but I had to work. Instead, I got to go to the "Law School Prom". My husband and I dressed up, left the kids with the babysitter, and headed to the zoo for an evening of drinking, dancing, and celebrating with his classmates.

I was amazed how many of my husband's classmates with whom I had developed a relationship.

It drove home how much of a shared experience this had been for the two of us.

Many of his classmates had joined us at our home for a meal at one time or another.

Many I had met at various law school events.

I just wish we had had more gatherings like this during law school. I'll miss my hubby's buds.

Finally, it was time for graduation.

The process of getting to graduation was a bit crazy. My mother-in-law got there ahead of everyone and tried to save nine seats in a row, enduring name-calling and abuse in the process. In the meantime, I had to run out and get stockings and sweaters for my girls since the weather turned rainy and cold. Already in a rush, we attempted to get my grandmother into our high-up minivan, but her knees protested. we took two cars instead, my parents following with my grandmother in and out of Chicago traffic. At the venue we discovered that a wheelchair would have been handy. The ushers were calling everyone in, "we're locking up in two more minutes!", while my grandmother and I hobbled down the long corridors as fast as we could, until a kindly usher came along with a wheelchair. 

In the end, none of us ended up sitting together, and Granma Thuthin had to give up the nine seats.

Graduation itself was a beautiful and meaningful event for us, despite the chaos of trying to get the whole family there on time. The speakers captured the spirit of the occasion talking about the support and sacrifices of the graduates' families and of the hopes and opportunities of the future. In my deeply emotional and moved state, it all rang true. 

Northwestern University Law School does something beautiful I don't recall seeing in any other commencement ceremony. They invite the children to walk across the stage with their graduating parent. I've always found graduation ceremonies to be a bit tedious and merely endured, but this one was different. We may have been sitting in three different sections, but all of us were there together, all of us having made different sacrifices to celebrate my husband's commencement.

Part 2: Time to get the party started!

Event horizon

Shabbat is over. My husband sits at the dining room table typing away. Already he's hard at work editing a paper due next week. The kids are asleep, and I'm surfing the internet for lack of anything better to do. Well, that's not entirely true. I could be washing more dishes, or being otherwise practical and productive, but it is Saturday night. Although it feels like any other Saturday night, there's one major difference. That paper my husband is working on is his very last assignment for law school, ever. He took his last exam on Thursday. By next Saturday night, it will all be through.

Wow.

Plans for graduation are coming together nicely. My Skokie sister was kind enough to purchase a new home and renovate it over the past few months. She's especially sweet enough to be moving into it next week leaving her old home empty and available for me to borrow. My 90 years old grandmother (hamza, hamza, bli ayin hara'ah, ptui, ptui) doesn't do stairs, so our second story flat won't cut it. So, we'll be furnishing my friend's Skokie split level with borrowed beds, folding tables and chairs, and calling it home for graduation weekend. It will also be party central on Sunday afternoon. I'm planning on decorating the place with balloons and streamers, and preparing a wide array of hors d'oeuvres and my world famous margaritas, and inviting the world to celebrate the end of law school widowhood!!

Speaking of parties, I've planned a birthday party for my angelic terror at the ballet school for mother's day afternoon. My sweetie has turned four, and this is going to be her first real birthday party. She keeps asking me, "is my party tomorrow?" It's rough not having any real concept of time. Big sister's birthday party is going to have to wait for me to get through at least one of the many events on my horizon. She wants a sleepover party, but I think she's still a little young for that. My Cinco de Mayo girl is on the cusp of seven and ready for the Ivy Leagues.

My parents tell me I was an early reader. They love to recount the time I was three and reading the different flavors of Baskin Robbin's ice creams. The kid behind the counter was convinced I'd memorized them all. It didn't amount to much in the long run, so I don't normally get worked up when my kids are ahead of the learning curve, but this kid is the real deal. At the beginning of the year she was struggling with basic readers. By winter break, she was stammering through Ramona the Brave. A month later she devoured the first three books of the Harry Potter series.

This past month her school held a reading contest, challenging the 3rd through 8th graders to read 1600 pages in a month. 1st and 2nd graders could participate if they chose. My little Einstein chewed through Charlotte's Web, Because of Winn-Dixie, Bridge to Terabithia, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and a half dozen other books in a two week period, topping it off with Alice in Wonderland, to take home the top prize: dinner with a teacher. She's six.

Big brother got the top prize, too, but he managed it in three books. Two of them were book 6 and 7 of the Harry Potter series, which already got him three quarters of the way there. I'm surrounded by scholars!

I attribute my kids scholastic success to their father. Seeing him poring over his law books, cliticky-clacking away on his laptop night after night, has clearly made an impression. It's hard for them to moan and whine about having to do homework when they witness their father sweating it out every night. We're going to have to make the most of the week and a half he has before starting to study for the Bar exam. If all I've heard is true, this two day exam is going to make law school look like a picnic.

My dear friend used to say, "buses come in fives." My head is swimming with all of the events we have around the corner. In addition to all of the birthday and graduation celebrations, we've got piano and dance recitals coming up, and if that weren't enough, I'm starting a skating program at my school this week. I will be teaching 150 fourth to seventh graders in-line skating. I haven't been in a pair of skates in over four years, and I wouldn't have considered myself an expert then. It should be amusing. I'm also planning the big field day event at my school with an international theme this year. I've come up with seventeen games from around the globe, now I have to organize the kids and faculty to run it, get all of the necessary equipment together, and pull it all off with panache.

Somehow, it doesn't seem as staggering as it should. For the past three years it felt like life was a great big treadmill. My husband worked and worked and worked with no end in sight. All of a sudden, there are no more exams to outline, no more papers to edit. For once, we're checking items off the to-do list without replacing them with another three. The kids and I only have another six weeks before school is out for summer.

For the first time in three years, I can look down the road to the distance horizon, and see the end of the journey. Or to put it a way my six year old can understand, We're just a couple of paragraphs from the end of the chapter.

Wow.