My FB memories has been full of orientation pictures from my D’s freshman year.
Prayers for all the kids that they have a good freshman year and hugs to the parents as you all make the adjustment.
I’ll warn you all that the undergrad years FLY by in the blink of an eye. Here’s to an enjoyable next 4 years for all!
IIRC, your kid is at RIT, right? My kid is also. And I just got confirmation pictures that Dad dropped C25 off and all the stuff is in the dorm. (Although no pictures “post unpacking/making the bed”.) And C25 asked me not to text for the first couple of days while they catch up on sleep from the red-eye and unpack stuff and meet people and things.
The roommate is still the same one (cuz although a change was requested, it’s not gonna get actioned for a couple of weeks), and things seem to be “ok”, although not the bff action my kid was sort of hoping for.
And between dropping off C25 with the luggage from the plane and Dad going to the “drop location” to pick up the shipped stuff from Amazon (my Aunt’s house across town) and drop it off, C25 found a new D&D group to join. So maybe things are gonna be alright.
And, well, social fake things are kind of required when 3,000 people arrive in a new location and need to sort themselves out into affinity groups of various stripes. If nothing else, when you go to a group thing, you might find the other people who aren’t into that group thing, and you can “ditch” together and make a rogue group thing. 
I almost wonder if my C25 is the roommate of @L_NewEngland 's C25. That would be quite a coincidence, though.
Got my first post-drop off phone call on Sunday. (S25 knows I look forward to S22’s Sunday calls, and apparently plans to do the same. I honestly didn’t expect one this week, so it was a nice surprise.) So far so good. He’s vibing well with the roommate, has met some other people, and is having a good time. He’s checked out another dorm (his roommate has friends in the engineering dorm) which is “so cool mom, you can see the football field from the lounge” and has found the buildings where his classes will be. He told me that on Friday he and some guys went “trashbagging”. Not knowing what trashbagging is, I had to ask. It’s apparently when you put on a trashbag, rub it down with soap, and slide down a hill like a sled on snow. He had a great time although he also grass stained his brand new shorts (and not the cheap target brand athletic shorts, the nice light orange to match Clemson shorts from Vineyard Vines that are the most expensive shorts I’ve ever bought but he saw them a few days before we took him down and I was sating my sadness with spending.) Fingers crossed that comes out. Anyway, all that was by 2:00 on Sunday. He hadn’t met his RA yet - they were supposed to have a hall meeting later that day, and most of the official orientation stuff hadn’t started (move in was staggered - Wed-Sat, so they waited until Sun to do any important stuff). But he sounded good and happy and that’s good.
Then yesterday I drove S22 up to Massachusetts to get him settled in before the start of senior year. Because he finished last year abroad and never went back to MA, one of his buddies was supposed to move his stuff out of the old room and into the new. We had a lot of things at home, having brought stuff at spring break before the abroad term. Buddy didn’t move anything. Fortunately, the old room was in the fraternity house, so it’s not like a stranger was moving in. The guy who has the room this year just shoved stuff basically into the hall or under the lofted bed. (And by stuff I mean bedframe, mattress, dresser, pillows.) By the time we finished the drive to MA yesterday, there was enough time to unload the car and to take my kid to the grocery store, but after that I had to catch the T into Boston so I could get to the airport in time to fly home, so I couldn’t stay to help move things from the fraternity into the new apartment. I’m hoping his buddies helped last night, but I’m kind of bummed that I didn’t get to see the room set up.
S25 started classes yesterday. We FaceTimed last night. His two Poli sc classes were gonna be ‘easy enough’ and his sociology class he still needed to figure out. His professor was a bit confusing in her delivery. Whatever that means. He sat in the front row of all three classes, introduced himself after class to one of the professors and was the only one to ask a question in one class. He’s joined prelaw society, lifting club and plans to run for student govt and plans to apply for the emerging leader program. He was exhausted. You could see it in his eyes so we let him go so he could go to sleep. He’s going 
into this new experience obviously. We’re hoping it levels out as the days continue and he can find a balance. But overall we’re so proud and happy that he’s getting along well.
Today there are reports that his Spanish class is in a bldg with a broken ac at 3 in the afternoon. His most dreaded class in Aug in the south. Ugh. That’s gonna be a rough day.
Also, my husband wouldn’t have made comments about pronouns, so having read that post, I’m gonna say not a chance.
I know this wasn’t the main message, but if he needs stain removal help in the Boston area, let me know… 
Maybe oxy? Or Dawn?
ETA - sorry I see they were different children. Sorry!
No worries - thank you for the offer though! My sister is a baseball mom and she told me about some kind of bar thing (Fels-Naptha) that she says you can get at Walmart and it gets baseball pants clean from grass stains, so I told him to go find that and give it a go. We’ll see. It’s just the smack-my-head of it all. He has a million pairs of black athletic shorts, but NO, he doesn’t wear THOSE to slide down grassy hills…
College kids are something. I’m helping my D22 get packed up right now because we’re driving her back to school on Friday. She had packed all her shoes in grocery bags, and she asked if I could look at her Keens because she had left them “maybe a little muddy” after some event.
Um, yeah. There were entire dried bricks of mud on the bottom of these shoes, which had been tied up in these grocery bags since May.
I had to bang them together and scrape them off outside for 20 min, and now they’re soaking in Oxy. And they stink.
We moved in D25 on Sunday at 9am, had a slow start due to 8 people in the room and a short break for lunch and D25 and her roommate had to leave at 130pm for orientation. We stayed an additional hour to finish up and clean up some things. She forgot some jewelry at the hotel (we stayed until the next morning) so we did a quick meet up at 10pm for a photo with her as she was in a nervous rush earlier that afternoon as she hates to be late.
All these students talking about being bored and my daughter is waiting to breathe! They had orientation events from 130pm-10pm Sunday (immediately after move in) and then orientation program from 8am-10pm on Monday, mostly outside and walking all over campus so she was just exhausted! Today was again, more orientation program from 8am-4pm, then a short break then back at it from 730pm-930pm. Wednesday is a full day of organized programming from 8am-8pm, Thursday is 8am-10pm. And she finally gets to breathe on Friday and Saturday with only two short 1 hour mandatory sessions. Sunday before classes start the next day is their big meet the clubs party from 4-7pm.
She has had zero time to miss us!
One of two texts I got so far from S25 was “Mom, how do you get permanent marker out of a shirt”? (And the other was that he forgot his nice dress pants).
I told him to google it on how to remove permanent marker…I know there are many methods, and who knows which one he actually can make work. Or he can find some other creative way to cover up the place where he got permanent marker on the O-Week shirt he’s supposed to wear multiple times this week! 
The O-week advisors are supposed to wash everyone’s shirts every night! 
Oh wow! I don’t know if he knew that when he texted me about it (the mishap with the permanent marker happened within hours of drop off!). I didn’t hear from him again about it, so I never heard the outcome.
He also realized right after we left that he left the dress pants at home…I assume he was thinking of wearing them for Matriculation, but based on the videos I watched I’m sure he was fine with khakis instead.
Progress! S25 drove me (cautiously, nervously, slowly, and with his father giving extremely blow-by-blow instructions) to my meeting tonight, which involved at least four stop signs, a bunch of turns, and driving down a narrow street with parked cars on both sides after making an unprotected left with pedestrians and oncoming traffic. Both parents survived this experiment and I even managed not to talk (mostly).
Me, piping up brightly from the back seat at one point: “A good analogy is…”
H + S, in almost perfect unison: “Stop.”
Tangentially related, I remembered that we still haven’t dealt with a will or set up housing trust for son (I know…this should’ve been done years ago.) Maybe we shouldn’t both be in same car with same driver before we get that done?
DH and I can both do almost every household/kid thing. But teaching the kids to drive was just going to give me a heart attack. I sit in the back and cover my eyes and ears and yes, if I had something to say, I could be the one to whom they said “stop” in unison like you
My sister told me that her husband is the same way (as me) and that he had to have a blanket over his head. I didn’t learn until much later that BIL wore that blanket even while in the FRONT seat (teen nephew was licensed, but still). They were pulled over by a police officer who thought nephew might be kidnapping someone.
On this note, we need to finish ours. We started wills in Dec 2020, got trusts set up, then never fully executed the wills or put anything into the trusts. This may go onto my list of Things To Do Now That Kids Are Gone.
Welp, today is the first day of school for my S25. I asked for a first day of school selfie… did he go to the cute area in front of the main academic building for his major where they’ve set up a whole thing? No he did not. Did he take a photo with his backpack on in front of his door, like we have for every other first day of school for his entire life? No he did not. He appears to be at the gym, he’s got a tank top on and headphones with crazy hair, and a very pained fake smile. But since he was already at the gym at 7:20 today, I guess he’s up and going. Here’s hoping it’s a great first day.
Hooray!
DH and I somehow survived teaching twins to drive, one of whom has a motor skills delay, the other of whom has three different kinds of anxiety disorders, and both of whom have ADHD.
We had to tag team – and take lots of deep cleansing breaths, lol.
My daughter tends to lap her brother in everything, but this was one area in which he was the more determined one, so he learned to drive competently first. But she wasn’t going to let him be better than her, so she got there, too. Imagine his dismay when he was away at camp over his 16th birthday, so his sister was able to get her license a week before him.
You couldn’t pay me to go back to that time period.
It’s been nice seeing everyone stories moving their kids into college, and all of the trials and tribulations that have come up. Definitely helps us prepare here!
But one thing we didn’t anticipate was what we are now calling “The Long Goodbye.” The majority of my daughter’s close friends will have moved in by tomorrow, and they have been doing a long series of (what feels like) daily See Ya Later get togethers. Originally my kid was happy to have extra time at home before school starts, but now she is in this weird somber limbo, just waiting for her turn to go. Thankfully she signed up for a pre-orientation Leadership program to get an early jump on moving and settling in.
I think she is also experiencing a bit of feeling left behind as well, since her friends are all attending schools that are over two hours away, while her college is actually less than an hour from our house. Anyone else have a child in the same boat?
C25 doesn’t leave until Sunday, and they’re one of the last of the friend group to leave. I can tell it’s wearing on them and they’re a little sad. That said, it is TIME TO FREAKING PACK ALREADY!! Let’s goooo! 