College Move In

Today is the big day.  We moved our oldest child into college, and we managed to make it home again before Hurricane Irene began to dump serious amounts of rain on us. 

I remember his first day of kindergarten like it was yesterday.  The confusion, the lines of excited parents and children, and the very confused siblings.  Our daughter was 1 1/2 when the oldest one started kindergarten, and she was standing next to her brother, holding his hand up until he walked into the door.  She was very, very upset that we would not let her follow him into the kindergarten classroom.

This morning was amazing.  The same experience; excited parents and children, lots of chaos, and some very confused siblings. 

We moved after our son finished 6th grade, as did several of our friends.  We had some amazing people that we had lost contact with over the last couple of years with the stress of raising teenagers.

And here's the amazing part:  My son's best friends from that time in his life are also attending the same University with him.  They are all in the same dorm.  They are all on the same floor.  We saw the parents in the dining hall at lunch time, and it was like old home week!  It was wonderful. 

The boys all slunk off while we crowded around the middle of the dining hall, hugging each other and shaking hands. 

As I started to walk off with our second child, he was stopped by several kids that he's met at the regional robotics tournaments over the last couple of years.  They were all like "hey, how's it goin'??" And doing that weird handshake that they do,  and then he introduced those kids to his brother, who will be the student there this fall.

Move in was amazingly smooth, and textbooks were purchased within 20 minutes of walking in the door of the bookstore.  We left at 1:00, just as the first of the weather was arriving.  We got home safe and sound a little while later, and I'm sitting here now, listening to the rain pound down on the house. 

I still have mixed emotions about him going off to college, but I feel much better knowing that he already knows several kids before classes even begin...

All packed and ready to go!  I hope we didn't forget anything important!

Now this was cool.  It's a line of about 20 Power One electrical maintenance trucks from Florida.  They were headed East on  Highway 70 when we saw them.  Thanks for the proactive help!

And here's all of the stuff, waiting to be moved in.  The University actually had Office Movers on hand, with big carts - think of the carts that industrial laundries use.  They were there as soon as I took the picture, loaded the stuff into the cart, and took it upstairs with our son.  Total move in time: 10 minutes.

Nifty clouds.  These were swirling around as we were getting ready to leave, dumping lots of rain on us.