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Today I had to wake up around 7am to get ready for my cousin’s graduation. It was a little difficult getting up because we lost 2 hours of sleep, but it was definitely necessary. Once we got ready, we had breakfast with the family at 8. It was nice saying prayer and then eating together as a family. It was a refreshing experience for me. My aunt made this delicious French toast casserole that we were getting the recipe for. After breakfast, we got our things ready to go. We went to Northern Illinois University for the ceremony, instead of his high school. About thirty minutes later, we finally got to the university, but we were surprised how many people were there early. We got into the stadium looking to take pictures before the ceremony, but we were not allowed in the waiting room. Instead we found seats and took pictures with the family. The graduation started promptly at 11, and there were a lot graduates. We learned later through the ceremony there were about 1,014 of them. The speeches and performances by the students were great. While I was sitting there, I was reflecting on my own graduation. I thought how crazy it was that just a year ago, I was in the same position as he was. Last year I was graduating from both high school and community college. Because I was class president, I was presenting a speech to my fellow graduates and I got really emotional. Many of them were my friends for years and even those that weren’t, we got really close during our high school careers. I remembered how ghetto I thought our class was, we were doing everything to attract attention to ourselves. During the our ceremony, we were randomly singing songs, getting up to dance, we even threw beach balls to each other during the speeches. I laughed and smiled to myself missing all the people of my graduating class. After we cheered for him and the graduation ended, we took pictures outside with my cousin, Jalen. We began to leave once we felt rain coming down. It was a lot of traffic coming in and out because there was another graduation occurring right after. We returned back to the house and had lunch as we waited to meet up with our other family members. We were planning on going to downtown Chicago to go shopping and authentic Chicago style pizza. Unfortunately, we got a late start and it started to rain so we canceled those plans. Instead, we went to a nearby outlet center to look for some dresses for Active Appreciation night. We went to many stores but we couldn’t find anything cute enough for the occasion. We ended up stopping by my mom’s favorite store, the Coach store. I was going to get a purse that was on sale, but one of the sales clerk told me they were cheaply made and I changed my mind. We returned back to the house empty handed, but we did see parts of the Heat vs Pacers game. Most of my family members are Heat fans so it was nice bonding with them cheering on the James and the team. Instead of going out to eat, we decided to order Chicago style pizza and continue watching the game. After a while, the guys were asking each other random basketball ad football facts to see who knew the teams/players the best. It was funny seeing them get the answers wrong and then clowning each other. We all sat around in the living room when my aunt had more company come over.
