lost ...

well, in case you all have been wondering where the gilchrests have been the past 5 weeks, we have been lost in a sea of graduate studies. in fact, eric and i both have achieved significant milestones in our education.

FIRST: ERIC & COMPS!
eric has spent the past semester studying for his comprehensive exams, which are the culmination of three years of intensive PhD coursework and involve 3 days of 5-hours of testing (and writing). i think he wrote somewhere close to 60 pages double spaced for the tests alone during those 3 days. yes, sickening, I know. so far, we know that eric passed the first 2/3 of the exam which also happened to be the most difficult. here we are on friday when we found out that news:

we are still waiting to hear back about the final third, but nevertheless, we celebrated when he came home. here he is walking in the door right after his third and final day of comps:

he seems a little more carefree, don't ya think? :)

after class, i rushed home to make a special banner to celebrate his accomplishment - complete with the cutest polka dot green ribbon tying the green & gold letters together. our friend and fellow hall director nadine also blew up some balloons to honor him. here is a family picture that my mom took on the big day:

as you can see from the photo, ezra was mesmerized by the balloons. before eric came home, i kept having to tell ezra "those are daddy's balloons. we can't play with those." the next morning, every time ezra touched the balloons he said "dada ball, dadd ball." i think he was letting us know that he got that they were daddy's balloons. :)

to complete our celebration of eric, mom (who stayed with us for 10 days to care for ezra while eric took his comps and i attended my 412 end of the year meetings and tackled finals - more pics of her visit will follow soon) took us out to dinner later that evening at our favorite mexican restaurant for some awesome margaritas! :) here we all are celebrating:

thanks, nana, for a yummy fun dinner!

FROM APRIL: KENDEL & ANTIOCH

i celebrated a graduate victory of my own this past april when my three colleagues and i (we called ourselves D.E.C.K. Consulting Firm - for Dustin, Estee, Caitlin, & Kendel) won a cohort competition for a proposal creation of the new antioch college. our project lasted the entire semester and was similar to a first-year capstone project. the stakes were high for the competition - a guaranteed A on the assignment and a fine-dining experience with our professor, frank. needless to say, we were VERY satisfied to achieve victory after investing literally hundreds of hours in the assignment. in total, our proposal was over 60 pages long complete with appendixes and over 6 pages of references. we submitted our proposal to a 5-member board of trustees - important campus VIPs that frank had invited to complete the class's role play experience. the trustees read and critiqued the proposals from the four groups over the weekend, and the following monday our firm was given opportunity to further defend our proposal in a 30-minute presentation. D.E.C.K. = number ONE! (we are holding up our firm's business card that my sister designed - let's just say we had business "connections.")

our firm - looking totally hott in our business suits and after presenting totally awesome! we were all so proud of our work!

to come full circle, later that monday night after everyone's presentations, our entire cohort went out to the SAME mexican restaurant where we celebrated eric's completion of comps. unfortunately, i do not have a picture of the event. nevertheless, it was great to celebrate all together after a long semester of hard work!