yes, I was saying it all tongue-in-cheek. We find it funny.
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I had the discussion with my Mom and explained how a potential situation could arise. She insisted on getting a new bedding set immediately and came back with a neutral colored set. One of these shall be returned.
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Just popping in to catch up on everyoneâs move-in stories! Glad everyoneâs settling in 
We leave this evening to start our long drive (we donât get there until Sunday, and then move-in is Tuesday morning). Car is mostly packed; Iâm taking a coffee break. He finally is registered for classes as of an hour ago (after a scare the other day where his advisor still hadnât contacted him to set up a zoom meeting). One of the classes he wanted filled up like half an hour before his time slot, but he found a back-up that heâs just as happy with. Heâs getting one requirement for an English major and two for music done first semester, so heâs being very efficientâŠunless he changes his mind about majors. Okayâback to packing!
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S24 moved in is done. The kids in his program were a nice bunch so I think he will be fine.
Since the small SUV the rental gave us has so little space (i asked for a car but they didnât have anything else left), we had to ordered stuffs for him after we got to his dorm room.
Wife was crying and almost wouldnât let him go as the program dinner ended last night 
.
Texted S24 today and he said all is well. We shall see⊠
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Quiet Friday night at home, watching Jags on TV (looking good!), enjoying a nice Cab blend, playing bridge online, and missing my boy.
S24 is about as happy as I could have dreamed one week into college! He and his roommate and suite mates are all getting along and becoming friends, he loves his dorm, classes are going well, he is loving SEC fraternity rush, he went to a soccer game yesterday, heâs making lots of friends, one of his suite mates is running with him regularly so he is trying to stay fit and eat reasonably healthy. Truly an ideal start and it is such a relief! But I havenât heard his voice in 3 days (I donât want to call ⊠he has called me a few times but I am trying to give him space. He did like a text I sent him today)
D24 met virtually with her advisor today, is excited about her planned schedule, thrilled with her language placement, and currently planning to double major in anthropology and government. We shipped boxes for her move in today and head north next Wednesday. Nearly all her friends now are in school and her brother has been in college for a week so she is chomping at the bit! I will miss her a lot too. We had a particularly good summer together and she even interned at my office, so I may miss her extra hard.
T minus 5 days to totally empty nest
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Moved D24 into the dorms at Austin College yesterday after a 17 hr travel day the day before. Move in was great. It was a very sweaty and humid 100 degrees.
Very glad we brought an air purifier. Man, that thing got rid of the funk in the room in no time flat. Forgot the step stool at home so had to buy one at Target.
D24âs roommate is similar yet different than D24. Very down to earth. Met roommateâs parents. Theyâre down to earth, too. Good salt of the earth people. Picking up fridge from mail room was easy. D24âs dorm is close to the Campus Center building where the dining hall is.
The Child picked up her books from the bookstore. Bought her a lanyard to use with her student ID card. Kid grumbled about it until a bookstore employee said, âOh you should definitely get one of those. Youâll need your room key and ID everywhere.â
The room has lots of storage. Roommateâs family lives about an hour away. Roommateâs mom offered to have D24 do her laundry at their house. 
Roommate has a car, too, so thatâs handy because D24 will have easy access to somebody with wheels in case they all decide to do something off campus.
Lots of orientation stuff going on all weekend for students. Theyâre doing a Class of 2028 photo at 8:45 am today. D24 and roommate were already grumbling about having to be up early. 
Tech Support Dad got D24 connected to the campus WiFi. When D24 & roommate asked each other âWhere do we go for X?â I kept telling them to ask the RA or ask another student and eventually youâll get an answer. 
Thereâs parent orientation stuff going on today too so Husband and I are going to that. We ate dinner last night without The Child at a restaurant that serves El Salvadoran food. And dang, that was good. Itâs run out of an old gas station. Family owned and operated.
Am super tied but thatâs ok. No tears yet. Just happy and excited.
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Checking back in after a busy summer. So fun to read the 700+ posts I had missed! Love to hear all the move in stories, schedule questions and budgeting ideas.
We are packing the car today and moving D24 into her dorm tomorrow. She has been very sweet and cuddly all week. Some anxiety for a few days last week (what if I donât make any friends? what if classes are too hard?). She got it all out and is very excited now. I am going to miss her terribly. She is my âeasyâ kid and peacemaker. Now D27 will be the last of our 4 kiddos at home. My positive spin on her personality is âfiercely independentâ lol. She is not thrilled to have all parental focus turned on her. She plans to be so busy we never see her. I look forward to seeing a few of you over on the HS Class of 2027 page soon!
But this group of 2024 is special. Looking forward to all the thoughtful and supportive posts as our freshmen fly out of the nest.
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Move in went great! Perfect weather, second floor room and the first in the hall from the stairs (no elevator*), the blue bags and my husbandâs dolly/cart came in clutch (adding a link, because this thing is used all the time for his work and takes up no space and is a workhorse!) We were able to get her unpacked and set up before the welcome ceremony, and left the decorating for her to do. Only thing we forgot (and I canât even find it now that we are home!) was the cover for the body pillow. No idea where that drifted to.
The welcome ceremony is where it really hit for her, and she got a little overwhelmed hearing about all the things other kids have done (mine is a very average kid so hearing things like â40 percent of you have a GPA of 3.9 or higher!â Made her a little panicked, I think. We reconvened after that (and I reminded her that means that 60% DIDNâT have a 3.9+) and that is when she got a little teary, which was a bit of a surprise, sheâs a pretty stoic kid and not one to be too emotional, so the hugs and tears at the car were prolonged a bit. But, sheâs doing the thing, I did check her location a few times and she wasnât mooning in her room, and she checked in before she went to sleep and had made some friends/ met some people, done some stuff, and her bed was comfy and she survived her first dorm shower, and Iâm certain she slept like a log.
Practical tips (aside from cart and bags and borrowing a minivan if possible - my friend that I swapped with is loving driving my outback and my husband and I were wistful for our odyssey years, grass is always greenerâŠ)
-keep your party small! We left little sister at home, and with the roommate and her parents arriving at almost the same time as us, it was a lot of people in the room, we each ducked out a few times for lunch/water/etc to give the other family some space
-assemble furniture in a common area, husband was thankful for the elbow room to put together the nightstand and cart
-bring water and snacks and set up the fan first (New England so no AC, and it was not oppressively hot but we were glad to do that)
-have a bag at the top of the pile to start with - ours had the tools, bleach wipes, mattress cover, paper towels, fan, etc.
*there IS an elevator but it requires a key and is more of a freight thing, which we learned when someone was asking my husband for the key, where to get the key, and was clearly frustrated (and he was confused) until I piped up and said âwe are just parents, Iâm not sure who has the key.â The other parent immediately apologized saying âbut youâre wearing a a blue shirt!â (The theme of the day was that âif you need help ask someone with a blue shirtâ - 90% of DHâs wardrobe is blue, and his shirt wasnât even the school blue, but thatâs something to be aware of, maybe? LOL.)
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Our standard line with D30 is at this point we are just aiming for the âbenevolentâ sort of dictator.
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Speechless. Over here with same age range, two kids, and we are also happy if D30 is benevolent. Time will tell!
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Chilling out now at our hotel for the night. Bribed kid with snacks so we get to see her briefly tomorrow am before she has a meeting at 10:45. She texted DH this evening to report that the food at dinner was not to her liking. Itâs all part of the experience!
Parent orientation today was great. 53% of the class of new students are students of color. 30-ish % are 1st gen. People from 19 states and 3 other countries.
Talked to the Student Life Director. Turns out his brother lives about 15 min from us. Small world.
They had all new students download a Navigate 360 phone app. Thatâs how you request counseling appts, sign up for tutoring, and other counseling center and student success center stuff. There was a multi-dept panel of staff talking about how they all work together between departments to help and mentor students. And it was obvious the way they talked about it that it wasnât just fluff. Itâs a core part of the culture there. The professors talked about it too. DH and I are pretty impressed. So glad our kid is going to this school.
I think that D24 & roommate will end up being ok friends but not BFFs and theyâll probably get along fine as roommates.
Lots of student orientation stuff today, tomorrow, and Monday. Thereâs a festival on the campus green tonight, Monte Carlo night tomorrow in the church sanctuary on campus (which cracks me up, but I have a weird sense of humor), a service project on Monday where theyâre going to package up 50,000 boil-in-water meals for families in need in Honduras.
Meetings happened today with the First Year Seminar classes. Thereâs 20 kids in D24âs seminar. Professor is from Ghana and D24 said heâs been in the US for 8 years and âheâs kind of hard to understand because he has a thick African accent.â But sheâll get used to it. Her FYS class is about transcultural health.
The on campus chaplain did a really great short talk about getting involved in clubs on campus. He invited everybody to attend the weekly Sunday 6 pm services which are followed by a home cooked meal at his house afterwards right across the street from campus. Also talked about how thereâs no religion class requirements, they accept and welcome all faiths of all different religions, and he talked about the importance of appreciating everybodyâs differences. You could tell that he really believed it, it wasnât just blowing smoke.
Later in the day, the VP of Student Affairs (who has a PhD in I Donât Remember What Subject) talked about diversity, equity, and inclusion, and touched on all of the protests at college campuses everywhere over this past year re: topics I wonât mention here. He said that at Austin College, they arranged for a bunch of open discussions on those topics and purposely got students from all sides of those debates together and had moderated, adult, respectful discussions about it all so everyone could learn from it instead of yelling at each other. D24 and I got that vibe when we were here in April and it sounds like our gut take on the place was right.
Iâm not sad yet. Itâll probably hit me when we get home and D26 wants my help to un-bunk my kidsâ beds. But so far, so good.
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Also learned from 1 of yesterdayâs presentations that 3 classes is considered full time. And classes at other colleges which are 3 units get counted at AC as 0.75 credits, whereas 4 unit classes elsewhere would transfer in as a 1 credit class.
So THATâS why sheâs taking 4, and not 5, classes! Iâve been wondering about it for awhile.
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Finally back from dropping S24 at UVA (and driving down to UNC with the remainder of S22âs stuff). Our house seems oddly empty and mom (me) is feeling a little blue. S24 has gotten off to a really good start - met some nice kids on his floor, likes his roommate a lot and his dorm room, although small, is new, clean and air conditioned. The dorm is very nice with beautiful, bright study spaces. I think he is really going to like it. Only downside is the food - itâs awful and all the upperclassmen he has met gave him the headâs up. Heâll manage but it is a little disappointing that they donât do better - wasnât expecting UMass quality but the food was really not good at all (mediocre would be fine). S22 is slowly settling in at UNC and hoping to make the ultimate frisbee team (he was on the team at UMass) - I think heâll like it once he has gotten into the swing of things.
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Just back from D24âs early move-in to a third floor walk-up at Harvard on Thursday. I have mobility challenges and an acute knee injury, so at the 11th hour we hired assistance from dolly.com, which proved incredibly useful.
D24 is attending an arts pre-orientation (FAP! 5 out of 5 stars, highly recommend). We flew in a few days prior to move-in so that she could gain her bearings in Cambridge.
Fortuitously, our early arrival enabled her to meet her suitemates who had settled in even earlier as they were heading out for a camping / hiking pre-orientation trip (FOP). Sheâs on her own in the suite until the 27th, but the FAP proctors have kept her so busy that she really hasnât had time to be alone when she isnât sleeping. She had to skip breakfast to receive our delivery of hugs and additional goods from Target.
Goodbyes are bittersweet, of course, but, Friday night we literally passed by her on the street and she was so engrossed in a conversation with a group of students that she didnât even notice our presence. Suffice it to say, I think she is adjusting well and enjoying the experience!
Wishing the best to all with future move-in dates ahead!
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What a blessing, to be able to see your D in the college environment âin the wildâ so to speak.
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Absolutely! Not all moments were that magical, but wow, that one was a gift.
Counterbalancing moments included having our sleep disrupted by a hotel fire alarm complete with evacuation by stairs and what I can only describe as a painfully thorough Thai massage-style palpitation of my injured knee by an overzealous TSA agent, after they insisted on removal and xray of my brace.
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S24 updated us on his course registration appt with his advisor. He didnât get all the courses he had originally wanted but he went in knowing that was pretty unlikely and he thinks the courses he will be taking are pretty good. He did get 2 of his top choices, so he is taking that as a win.
Liked advisor which is good, since advisor is also FYS professor.
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I like those sheets a lot! 
which meansâŠimmediately purchasing a neutral replacement was the correct move.
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I can relate to the empty house and feeling a bit blue! We dropped D24 off at Vanderbilt last weekend and just got back from dropping off D22 at the airport for her semester abroad in Madrid. Iâm excited and happy for both my girls but I know this next month or so will be a big adjustment for all of us.
Move in for D24 went really well. Sheâs had ups and downs this first week and has been so much more communicative than she ever was at home. I love this! All in all, I think sheâs off to a good start
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Jealous of those of you whose recent matriculants are communicating regularly! Iâve had a few very brief calls from S24. Heâs always happy, busy, and with new friends so all very positive, but Iâm considering sending him $10 if he calls me unprompted, maybe more if he shares actual information or talks more than 2 minutes. I wonder how long it would take him to catch on??
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