1. Lt. Governor gavels in the Mock Session | 2. Sundown on the Capitol | 3. Last walk to the hotel | 4. Sunrise from our hotel room | 5. Quick visit with the LG | 6. Requisite Awkward Selfie | 7. (Finally) some baseball | | 8. Daylight Savings Shandy

So here we sit. I'm up early so I can get a few minutes to myself before the rest of these bozos get up. I'm not going to lie. It's weird to have Cal upstairs and all of us ready to start a school day. Let's face it, he's not looking forward to it much.

I think we've already established that I'm a bit of a pre-travel stress shopper, so I wasn't surprised to find myself at the mall on Thursday before we headed to the Capitol on Friday morning. I'm never very lucky in those instances, but this day the dress gods were smiling on me for sure. I knew I'd done some good shopping work when we were in the hall of the hotel picking Cal up for dinner Friday night, and one of the girls, a fellow page, said to me, "Oh! I love your bag!" And then to Cal, "Your mom is so stylish... my mom just looks [unintelligible] all the time." Well. I call that a win-win-WIN.

We had a great dinner with Cal's roommate and his dad, and Neel and I spent the night in a gorgeous room in the hotel. Gorgeous was about all it was because 16 floors up we could still hear people coming home from the bars at 1AM, and yelling in the halls all night. Lovely.

Saturday morning was graduation. Cal had a bit more time to work at the Capitol, and Neel and I came full circle as we ran into a family in the Starbucks at the hotel who we'd seen there on the very first day. If I have one criticism of the weekend at all, it's that the parents didn't get enough time together. We had a lovely lunch on the very first day, but it would have been nice to repeat it again at the last when we'd learned about each other's kids a bit. It was such a moving day. Full of so much.

My heart is full when I think about it all, and there's so much to tell you. Cal will write is promised post too. But right now it's back to life and back to reality. And getting back to those things is hard.

Before I go, I wanted to thank you for all your thoughtful comments on my post on Friday. I'm glad you don't think that blogging is dead! Like Petra said, this space is so important to me as a way to collect my thoughts in a much more formal manner than just journaling does. It's good for my mind that way. I never read style blogs or shopping blog (which makes that girl's comment above all the more shocking!) and even when I read home decor blogs, those things were secondary to me. Much like Christine, I go to your blogs for you. It's the details of your lives that matter to me and what you're thinking, whether that's about a chair or what you had for breakfast or what a new friendship means. So I guess we'll stick around, won't we? And let Rome burn around us, come what may. Love you ducks.