Congratulations!

I am so happy to announce the graduation of my wonderful husband. Like I always do, I will have to post pictures later because they are still being held captive on the camera. The Friday before graduation was the hooding ceremony. They have also added a new alumni banquet to the list of festivities since my graduation and that was pretty fun too. The hooding was very emotional, until it got the the slide show presentation and while we had all been waiting for hours through banquet and speeches and the hooding of his entire class, it got to him and whoever put the slide show together did not put one of the pictures that we sent into the slide show, it had Garth's school picture and a big picture of the health sciences center on it...what a rip off. It made me madder than it should have, but it really kind of sucked. Oh well. After the hooding, I had to run to work (since I had been paged 5 times during Garth's festivities) and so I took my mom with me and she got to see a little of what I do, then we went to a reception in the club seats at the stadium and it was pretty great. The food was good and unfortunately the view was really good, so Garth was already picking out our $30,000 football seats. Saturday was the actual graduation and it went flawlessly, Garth's brothers both made it to see their big brother receive his Doctor of Pharmacy degree. It was pretty moving. I seriously cannot believe that we are here, finished, done.

Thinking back, we have never been together when we were not in school full time. NEVER. When we started dating, I was a Freshman in college and we were engaged for both of our Sophomore years of school. We both worked full time and went to school full time for 3 years while we were finishing up school at Tech before we moved to Amarillo for my first year of Pharmacy School. When I started in Amarillo, I stopped working full time and I was just going to school full time, but Garth finished his studies at WT and worked full time too so we could pay the bills. When he got into Pharmacy School the following year, he started school full time and 'only' worked part-time (slacker), oh and he also became a dad that year. Since then, he has always worked at least part time while getting through a doctorate program to support his family. We may have had some bumps in the road, but we got here and we are so happy to be here. This Tuesday, I was working at CVS and so was Garth and I kind of got choked up a little thinking about how in the 9 years we have been together, 8 of them married, this was the first day that we were both working full-time jobs that were not interim, or intern, or tech jobs, that neither of us had to run to class after this, that we were both making a paycheck. It was a pretty amazing thought. We have worked hard to get here, so now all he has to do is pass the boards, then I quit ;) Kidding...sort of.

Anyways, congrats to my husband. Even though he doesn't even know what a blog is and he will most likely never read these words, I know he knows how proud of him that I am and how grateful we are to have such a loving father and husband in our home to protect us and to provide for us. Thanks for all the work you have done for us, and I hope that the $400 football tickets are enough for this year, and maybe next year I will let you even get a seat with a back on it. Love you forever!