9th Grade Graduation

Tonight was Lakeview Academy's 9th graduation. Honestly I thought it was a pretty stupid idea because we are Freshmen not Seniors. But I guess since we were leaving Lakeview and are the "oldies" of the group. The theme was "Hats off" so every 9th grader was supposed to wear a hat that represents us. Erin Barnes wore a flying pig hat. It had actual moving wings! She would pull strings that was attached to the wings enabling her to move them. Admittedly I was jealous because the gowns we had to wear were very hot and the wings fanned her. Anyway we all went up and got our diplomas and got our pictures taken, etc. etc. And most of all I SURVIVED MIDDLE SCHOOL! :) It's a miracle! Oh, and I have a 4.0 GPA.

La Caille

The Lakeview Academy's 9th grade class (all 21 of us) had the opportunity to go to La Caille last night (May 16th).
We had a couple of etiquette lessons preparing us for this and they were so complicated I was sure I was going to make a fool of myself messing up on all of them. We also learned how to remove the escargot from it's shell. Yuck! I was positive I was not going to have to worry about that part because I had no intention of even touching the snail.
The week leading up to the trip our Biology teacher taught his lessons in French and taught us some useful phrases. One thing that really stuck was the word for bread: la pain. Which of course isn't pronounced pain. But it was still pretty funny. Every time he would say it the whole class would bust out laughing.
The day of we went home early from school so that we could get ready. After about two hours we came back to the school to figure out carpool. It was kind of weird seeing everyone dressed up when we usually see each other in our school uniform. We all piled into cars and were on our way. There was only one boy in the car I rode in and the girls seemed to forget he was there on occasion and they would start talking about girl stuff and he would look at me with a look like "What have I gotten myself into?".
When we got to La Caille we all posed for a picture:

(Notice how I am in the front because I am so short!)





 We then walked around the beautiful grounds. There was ponds, swans, peacocks, geese, and chicken. My friend Maddie was terrified of the geese and every time we would walk past them she would squeak and run away. Most of the boys would abuse or try to abuse the animals but the animals had the common sense to run every time they saw them coming.
When went inside to eat it was amazing! It was like an old rustic house... a huge house! We all sat at tables and they served the escargot. Of course everyone was daring each other to eat it. When I managed to pull it out of it's shell it looked like a piece of brown mush. and it slid right out. But I decided to eat it. Not all of it but some. The texture was like a mix of sushi and mushroom. It tasted just like butter and garlic, but because of the texture it was really hard to get down. But now I can say I ate escargot! The next course was a salad with ranch dressing (yuck!). Throughout that course I kept repeating to myself: You ate snail you can eat ranch. Over and over. Next was the main course which was chicken. It was really good! Admittedly because I am technically a vegetarian I couldn't bring myself to eat all of it. The dessert was next: A crepe with vanilla ice cream, and chocolate on top. Of course this was the part I was looking forward to. Who wouldn't look forward to dessert?! It was AMAZING!  The only thing I wish they would have done was to keep the crepe warm. It was frozen! The hardest etiquette rule for me was no elbows on the table! It was so hard! I slipped up a couple of times and by the end of the meal I didn't care anymore!
After the meal we had sometime before the carpool came back to pick us up. We talked and walked around a little more. I actually ended up talking to the teachers most of the time.

Mr. Cordero (left) and Mr. Fullmer (right) looking like secret agents in the garden.