Hello High Wire Readers! I’m excited to join the family! 🙂 Well it’s the end of the school year and summer is starting! I thought it would be appropriate to have my first post be about graduation. For those not part of our religion, we have what is called the Young Women organization for girls ages 12 to 18. We meet each Sunday for a gospel lesson and then we meet once a week for an activity night.  We have an amazing group of girls! We wanted to do something special for our graduating seniors, this is something you can do for any special event (not just for graduation). We told the girls to be ready by a certain time and we would be there to pick them up. We kept the whole night a surprise. 🙂

We set up a table in my backyard and borrowed nice china, I made some simple center pieces using mason jars wrapped in twine and filled with flowers we got at the grocery store.

The whole night was Italian themed, we played authentic Italian music in the background. 
I made little name tags for them, we also had candles for when the sun went down but it was windy and they wouldn’t stay lit (oops!) We prayed for it not to rain on us, lightning was happening all around us, but our prayers were answered and there was no rain! 🙂 (Yay!)

We made each of the girls corsages with lace/burlap, felt flowers (I scored at my friend’s grage sale she had a bag of them already made!) and a little broach.  

My dear friend and one of the Young Women Presidency Councilors served her mission in Italy and makes the best authentic lasagna! She made the food, provided the music and gave us some fun Italian trivia. We were going to have their Sunday School teacher, who is Italian, be the waiter but something came up and he wasn’t able to make it.
I was worried the girls wouldn’t like these, but they ate them up so fast and kept requesting 2nds! They are called Caprese, it’s half cherry tomato, basil leaf and mozzarella cheese drizzled with balsamic vinegar. mmmm!   

After dinner we gave each girl a gift, I had made a little accordion photo album of pictures from our different activities throughout the year etc and gave one to each girl, we also gave them a temple recommend holder that has a picture of the Orlando temple on it, and we also gave each of them a cute journal I had found at Michael’s in the $1 bins, each of us wrote our testimonies in them. It was a wonderful night enjoyed by all the girls! One girl who is new to the group said “I’ve never done anything like this, this is so much fun!” another girl said “It was so relaxing, just what I needed right now!” It was the perfect night! It was so great to get to spend quality time with them and send them off to college in the right way. I’m going to miss these girls so much! 
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