Yay, youngest brother!

My family has now welcomed one more college graduate into its ranks -- youngest brother has graduated from Texas A&M University with his engineering BS! Yay! Just about my entire extended family recently drove to College Station, Texas, to attend his commencement ceremonies.

Here's a shot of youngest brother with boy:

The trip to College Station allowed us a chance to introduce boy to the stomping grounds his daddy had roamed as an undergrad at A&M himself. We took some time to capture the sight of boy in a number of distinctly Aggie locations.

There's a magnificent tree on campus called Century Oak. It's enormous and stately and graceful, and very old. The tradition states that if a man proposes to a woman beneath that tree, their marriage will last a hundred years. The last time we visited campus, husband offered to recreate our proposal for me under the tree for the sake of good luck. Since I was seven months pregnant at the time, I passed -- it would have looked a little suspicious to passersby for a guy to be on one knee in front of a clearly pregnant girl. Anyway, we visited Century Oak with boy. Here he is walking beneath one of its impressive boughs with his daddy.

Very close to Century Oak, there's a statue of the first president of Texas A&M University. I forget his full name -- I think it's got "Sullivan Ross" in it -- but everyone calls him "Sul Ross" for short. Another of the Aggie traditions is that if you need some extra luck on your final exams, you put a penny at the foot of Sul Ross's statue and hope he'll lend you a hand or put in a good word for you Upstairs. When we stopped by the statue right after graduation, there were stacks and stacks of pennies at the foot of the statue (not to mention more than a few dimes). Boy put a penny there as a head start for his own tests someday.