It seemed almost unthinkable when I started writing these posts years and years ago, but it’s true: Julia graduated from high school last month and will be attending Santa Clara University this fall. It was a long and occasionally bumpy ride—returning from school after distance learning last year was nothing short of traumatic—but through grit, hard work, and determination (and occasional cussedness), she made it through high school and senior year.

The week leading up to graduation was hectic in the extreme. Julia spent every morning at school practicing for graduation—UPA takes the ceremony very seriously. Wednesday evening was the Senior Awards Banquet, in which seniors were recognized for their accomplishments during their UPA. During the dinner, Julia took home five different awards, including:

• Quill and Scroll, a high school journalism honor society
• National Honor Society, for academic achievement
• the Golden State Seal of Merit, for good grades across a broad range of subjects,
• the State Seal of Biliteracy, for achieving proficiency in a foreign language, and
• the Six Year Award, for students who spent the full six years at UPA

Each award came with a cord or medal that the graduate could wear with their gown at graduation; you can see Julia’s in the photos.

But for me, the clear highlight of the night was when Julia received one of four PTSO scholarships for an essay she wrote discussing some of the challenges she faced as a student whose brain does’t respond the same way to stimuli as most of her peers. As the sitting PTSO president, Julie recused herself from judging Julia’s essay, but she had the privilege of announcing her win, along with the other four winners. Although I have a few pictures, I wish I had thought to record video of the presentation; Julie was so caught up in the moment, she could scarcely get her words out.

We were very lucky in that Julie’s brother Andrew and my parents were all able to make the trip to San José for the graduation ceremony. In my parents’ case, it was a very near thing: thanks to staffing and COVID issues at the airlines, their original flight was canceled the night before they were scheduled to depart, and they were forced to scramble to reschedule. Fortunately, there were able to find something that arrived only a few hours later than they’d planned, though they did end up flying into San Francisco rather than San José.

The graduation ceremony itself was at the somewhat unfortunate time of 6:00 pm on Friday, but it moved quickly; if anything, it felt slightly shorter than the eighth grade promotion ceremony four years ago. Speeches and musical performances by students, teachers, and administrators were intermixed with video clips of the graduating class announcing what they would be doing after UPA. You can watch Julia’s clip here.

The ceremony was preceded by a performance by the small band ensemble that Joe was a part of, following their earlier appearance at the last band concert of the year a few weeks earlier. It was a fortuitous opportunity for Joe to play a small part in Julia’s big day.

After the ceremony, the full band was scheduled to perform for the graduates and their guests while they mingled outside the auditorium, and perform they did, but they were somewhat upstaged by a very loud Mariachi band that someone had hired to play in the adjacent parking lot. The UPA band seemed to take it mostly in stride, though they were undoubtedly a bit miffed, but I suspect the school administrators were not at all pleased by the disruption.

After Julia finished saying her goodbyes to everyone at school, we headed home and took some pictures in the living room, as Julia was still energized by the experience and happy to be the center of attention.

The rest of the weekend was restful compared to the busy week we had just surived. My dad helped me hook up our gas grill and pizza oven to the gas line on the patio—happily, we did not blow ourselves up—and we even managed to find a few minutes to celebrate Joe’s sixteenth birthday which, in a stroke of cosmic unfairness, happened to fall on Julia’s graduation day.

Continuing the streak of travel-related adversity, my parents’ flight home on Monday was canceled, leaving them to find an alternate route that ended up taking the through Dallas, but still got them back to Elk Grove Village that day. Even Andrew suffered a bit of unfortunate scheduling drama, which resulted in him arriving in Dayton a day later than he’d originally planned.

Once everyone had gone, we were left with just a few short days to recover from all the excitement before the next big milestone: Julia’s long-awaited major oral surgery. But that’s a story for another time.

Gallery: Julia Graduates from High School