New Pens, Grad Party & Tiny Jam

Both of my girls were looking summery and sweet in their yellow outfits today. Emerson is wearing a hand-me-down shirt from one of her Pullen cousins, and Addison is wearing a hand-me-down dress from her sister. Addie is also wearing some new purple crocs that she got for her birthday.

One of my coworkers has been working full time, and going to school part time for a few years now, and this past weekend, he finally completed everything and graduated from FSU! So today, of course we had to throw a little graduation party for him. I brought all the stuff I needed to make some crock-pot meatballs, and got everything started up once I got into the office.

I also got this new pack of fancy pens, based on a TikTok saga from this past weekend. Did anyone else see that girl and all her Bic pen videos? I love a good pen, and my favorite is actually a Bic, the Bold Velocity 1.6mm, because I like the thickness of it. But I wanted to try these out, in all these fun rainbow colors. I actually still like “my” favorite ones better, but these are going to be fun to write in all these colors for a while!

For lunch today, we actually had a big giant employee lunch out in the parking lot, for the kickoff to Correctional Employee Appreciation Week. We had Jimmy John’s boxes with subs, pickles, chips & cookies, and enjoyed sitting outside to eat, even though it was actually a bit too hot.

Then after lunch, we started setting up and decorating for our graduation party. We had about 5 or 6 people all working together for all the planning and everything, and a few more folks the brought in food. And everything turned out so nice! He even brought his cap & gown so he could walk down our little area, and we played the Pomp & Circumstance song on a cell phone for him.

My coworker Shanka made these fantastic chocolate-covered strawberries. She is incredibly talented, and these were absolutely beautiful! (She takes custom orders, if you ever need something like this!)

The graduate, Chris, with our Bureau Chief, Michelle.

The annual book fair popped up at GR this week, so I’m going to have to pry the girls out of these every single night, in order to avoid spending a trillion dollars 🤣

I am not actually planning to cook this week (because we’ve got too much going on), so Jeff and I had these charcuterie plates, and the girls had their own version of snack plates. I was actually still pretty full from all the food at the office today though, so I couldn’t even finish my plate, and I don’t think Jeff finished all of his either. The meat was actually a garlic summer sausage I got on super sale for 99 cents from Aldi a few weeks ago, and it was so good.

And this adorable tiny little jar is some apricot jam my parents brought back from their European river boat cruise, specifically from Germany. And it was soo good with the cheese & crackers and sausage.

I let the girls have some of the cotton candy from Addie’s party as their after-dinner snack, I guess because I was feeling especially wild and wanted to gamble with a ton of  sugar right before bedtime!

They were actually both very tired by bedtime though, and both fell asleep rather quickly and easily. Jeff has been busy working on tons of laundry and other little chores tonight. And now I’m going to wash up a ton of dishes that have been building up. We actually have plans to go out of town later this week, so we’ve got lots to do in the next couple of days…