A CEC Love Story
Remember when you wanted to “marry” your preschool classmates? Well, these two CEC Alumni actually followed through!
30 years ago, Jenelle Rotenberg and Dustin Graf were both typical CEC kids. They spent their days crawling in the unicorn yard grass, baking pies in the Bunny-Koala mud kitchen, and climbing along the spindly limbs of the beloved preschool-yard pine.
Bottom left: Jenelle; Upper left: Dustin’s Father and younger sister circa 1991.
Though two years apart in age, both Jenelle and Dustin were at the CEC together in the early 1990s, starting as Unicorns and moving all the way through Eagles and Flying Squirrels, with Dustin continuing in elementary school in the Whales. He has many fond memories of the CEC; from being so excited that he couldn’t sleep the night before the big preschool yard campout, to learning how to throw a ball with his friends in the Whale yard.
Dustin and Jenelle on their wedding day.
After the CEC, the early seeds of friendship that were planted began to blossom when Jenelle and Dustin ran track together at La Canada High School. They could often be found hanging out under the bleachers after track meets, just steps away from the Oak Grove site. Though their college years pulled them apart, they reconnected in Santa Monica not long after finishing their degrees and decided to make their relationship official. The rest, as they say, was history.
Nine years later, Jenelle and Dustin married in the summer of 2019, attended by some of the same friends they’d known from their days at CEC. When they considered starting their family, they knew they wanted the CEC to be a part of it.
Dustin, Jenelle, and their son, Rook.
Dustin recalled, “There was no other place that we could imagine living and raising a family in than the area where we grew up, with the support network of the CEC.”
After moving back to the La Canada area, it was an easy choice of where to apply for early care for their newborn son, Rook.
Today, Rook is happily crawling around on that same Unicorn yard grass that both his parents did those many years ago, even surrounded by a few of the same teachers after all this time.
We hope you will continue to support the CEC, so we can make more stories like Jenelle and Dustin’s for years to come!