My Last Day...

Yesterday was my last day at the center... very bittersweet. While I'm very excited about my new job, I'm sad to go. My staff and the Martha O'Bryan staff and the CWA staff came for a potluck lunch in my honor at the center yesterday. Here are some pictures of that!

The CWA Apartments staff... Billy, one of our off-duty police officers is the one giving me bunny ears!

Me and Sharon... my Nashville mom who takes care of me, partly because her daughter lives a plane ride away and hopes someone takes care of her.

And me with Misty Moody, my partner in crime and supplier of tires the last several years.

Then once the kids arrived after school, we had another party! They made a slide show for me with pictures from my last eight years. Of course I had taken the majority of the pictures so they had trouble finding any with me in them! Some of my girls that are in college now came, as did one of my students that moved out of the apartments. I got lots and lots of cards! When I can get them all in one spot I'll take a picture of all my gifts. I really wasn't expecting it! Even one of my volunteers showed up with a gift. Very generous people! Probably one of my favorite gifts is a framed picture of my students (or most of them!) that was given specifically for me to hang in my new office. They all signed the mat around the picture. Here are a few of the pictures from last night. I think I might try to do a slide show on blogger later today with all of them.

This is Jalisa, one of my graduates!

These are the Eli sisters... Yasmine, Ilham, and Jihan. I've had them in my program for at least seven years! Ilham is at Belmont this year, Yasmine is a junior in high school and Jihan is in the 7th grade! I've known them since they were teeny tiny! In fact, Jihan was in Kindergarten I think!

My yummy, yummy cake!

This is Kenithia, our Education Assistant and one of my all-time favorite people! She's rescued me a countless amount of times since she came in August of 2006!