Christopher: Graduate, Mechanic, Great Guy!!!

This weekend, it's time for Michelle and I to be proud parents. It's hard to believe that Christopher is graduating from high school. We now have a second child who is a high school graduate. Amazingly enough, though, Michelle and I are not getting older. HA! To the left here is the graduation announcement that I put together for him; the photo is from his senior pictures that we just took in March. I will get around to posting them eventually.

Earlier this week, Christopher made an interesting analogy, from the pulpit in church, actually!!! It had to do with churning horsecrap in to butter - it was really funny, though highly embarrassing to his parents, sitting in the second pew in the chapel at church. We could just feel the eyes boring in to the backs of our heads. :-) Check with Christopher if you're interested in hearing the details behind that analogy.

We are very proud of Christopher and the awesome young man he has become. As you can see from the announcement, he ships off to Army National Guard Basic Training on June 30th. After 8-10 weeks of that, he'll then go to Virginia for six months of AIT (Advanced Individual Training), learning how to repair Apache helicopters. Then he'll come home and still be in the Guard, but he cannot be deployed to any current conflicts (new conflicts are fair game) until he has had two years of school. So after AIT, he will do a semester of school at BSU, after which time he can take time off to serve a mission for the church, which he intends to do. Long term, he is considering a career in law enforcement, while he continues his eight-year commitment to the Guard. He LOVES those drill weekends, and I'm sure the two weeks of exercises every summer will be awesome for him, even if he never gets deployed to active duty military. But what are the chances???...

Christopher is a great son and brother, and a great guy to everybody. Christopher goes out of his way to help people in need, and everybody loves him. Through his three years of auto tech and through his own learning and experience, he has become a great auto mechanic. Just in the last week alone, he was requested to look at a cars by three friends and neighbors. To the right here is Christopher replacing break pads and rotors on a friend's car. This is just what Christopher does, and he enjoys it. In this photo, both Christopher and Brianna are making silly faces; only Christopher's girlfriend, Norah, looks normal!

We're excited for Christopher's graduation Tuesday night!!! And he is SO excited to be done with high school!!! :-)