Hey y’all, I’ve been dipping in occasionally this summer but haven’t had much to report or contribute. S25 has been having an old-school Gen X-style summer (that’s the spin I’m putting on it, anyway) – he never managed to find a job (late start + haphazard application strategy probably didn’t do him any favors) and has basically been slacking. Most of his friends are either better self-starters or were programmed by their parents and are traveling around Europe, doing NOLS courses and summer classes and camps, etc. He also starts school a month later than many of his friends. It’s a lot of sleeping late, watching movies on his laptop, etc. Hard as a parent to watch and not intervene more. Once a week or so I drag him out on a hike or micro-adventure but otherwise he’s hanging out, occasionally with friends but often alone. College hasn’t seemed top of mind.
He did manage to score a dorm room (a triple in the engineering LLC at UW) and has the names of his roommates. They haven’t contacted each other but he is optimistically buying very large posters of various bands (Nirvana, Black Sabbath, Pink Floyd) to put up on the walls. That should be an interesting conversation…
He has two days of online orientation this week and just this weekend he’s started researching classes (mostly just amazed by all the languages they offer at UW, and weighing whether he should stick with his plan to learn German so that he can do an engineering semester abroad in Germany or Switzerland – or learn something like Farsi, which is his late grandfather’s native tongue.) He did have a meeting with disability support services that I need to follow up on and he found out that his CA-based psychiatrist is able to prescribe meds in WA State, which means he can keep seeing her on breaks and won’t have to find a new psychiatrist. I am relieved to have one less thing to worry about on that front.
On the shopping front, I’ve procured sheets (dark gray, because he is not going to wash them very often), a duvet cover (although I hear it’s going to be roasting in the dorms), a mattress topper (but not the one y’all have – feeling like I missed the memo on that one), a laundry backpack, and a Woozoo fan (yay Costco!) I also bought him new giant bell-bottom jeans and a belt. We will get him new shoes (I’m thinking new running shoes + either lightweight waterproof hiking boots or Blunnies) and a waterproof shell. We have tons of towels for our small family and I’m not sending this kid off to school with brand new ones when his MO is to leave them in a crumpled wad in the bathroom (even when he hangs things up they somehow mildew!) We’ll get lamps/rug/extension cords/power strips etc. once we get there and see what the space looks like. I think we can rent a fridge/microwave for the room, which makes more sense to me than trying to sort out summer storage. I don’t know how much he’s going to try to bring – he might bring his guitar, his commuter bike, potentially a road bike if we can somehow store it in his dorm room (but we might see if he can borrow one from his uncle before committing to keeping a bike at school. Not sure if the cycling team will be his cup of tea.) He has stereo components, including funky old speakers that look like organ pipes – but we might want to wait on something like that until he actually knows his roommates. My hunch is that most music will be heard through headphones.
I am nervous about this launch, y’all. This kid is a good soul but he’s such a space cadet. Last night, for example, his dad put some dough out to proof and asked him to stick it in the fridge before he went to bed. To help him remember, Pop stuck left the bread on the floor outside the door to the office where S25 was playing video games. I reminded him and he was kind of salty about it. And yet…when he went to bed, he opened the door to the office, stepped over/around the bowl of bread dough on the floor without seeing it, and went to bed, leaving it there. Oops…
I hear from a lot of people that boys are late to the party when it comes to sorting themselves out. I want to believe this could be true but it’s going to have to be one hell of a steep learning curve if he’s going to survive freshman year. 