Swearing at a Swearing In

My sister is awesome. She recently finished law school and passed her bar exam. Last week we watched her get sworn in as a bona-fide lawyer! We are all proud of her.

I love to expose my boys to lots of different situations and this was one we were not about to miss. I think watching things like graduations or official ceremonies when you're young exposes you to the idea that big things are possible.

We drove the nearly 3 hours to the state Capitol with little incident and parked with 5 minutes to spare for the first (state) ceremony. This is not much time when you have to unbuckle and put shoes back on three little boys, but I was giving it my all. Everybody was finally out of the car and I was yelling "Go, Go, Go" like a we were on a special ops mission. We got to the entrance and found out it was under construction so we ran around the back, several shoes somehow coming off in the process. I threw them in my bag and we kept on moving, some of us in socks, but this was a desperate time. The workers were less than helpful inside when I asked where the ceremony was taking place but did point me to a different building-across the street. We ran over there (by this time I was getting the nervous sweats) but were super late by this point. So I decided we would just cut our losses and make our way over to the federal ceremony-which, coincidentally, was right back across the street where we started (thank you government workers for withholding this information).

Upon re-entering the capitol building we made our way to the ceremony location as slow as molasses because we kept getting distracted by statues of famous Missourians.

Me: "Come on, buddy, we already missed one ceremony today, we don't want to miss another!"
Big J: "But this statue is William Clark and you know he's my favorite explorer!"

Fair play.

We finally got settled in our seats and the ceremony began. I looked at my boys sitting nicely and proudly watching their aunt. 1 minute later I started passing out peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to keep it that way. 3 minutes into the ceremony I was frantically trying to wipe peanut butter off the seats. 5 minutes in and we were being shushed by the lady in front if us because the seats were squeaky and the twins didn't weigh enough to hold them down so they kept folding up and making noise. 8 minutes in and we were running the halls outside the house gallery where we learned, among other things, that the Missouri state symbol has bears on it and the majority of state officials don't appear to work on Fridays. We also came across a sign detailing the rules to be observed in the House Gallery, of which we had broken all but smoking.

After the ceremony we had a celebratory lunch and drove home. Congratulations, O'Claire! Thanks for inspiring your nephews!