This is a post I probably should have made immediately after it happened. We moved Ellie into college in August. But I had made sure to plan a lot of activities for the couple weeks after we moved her in, in case I needed distracting from missing her. And life is generally busy, so I’m just now sharing this.
As I’ve shared in previous posts, we did a lot of college visits Ellie’s senior year. We had to squeeze them into one year, because COVID delayed our start by a lot. She looked at colleges in Florida, Indiana, Illinois, Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and D.C. In the end, though, she chose Purdue, the alma mater of both her parents. It is also the closest and cheapest university she applied to. This was probably the first time in her life she chose the cheapest and most convenient thing, and she picked a good time to do it!
Like most colleges these days, Purdue has an optional orientation program for freshmen that involves moving in about a week before classes start. Purdue calls its program Boiler Gold Rush (BGR). Ellie registered for BGR and picked a Monday move-in, which meant Andrew and I needed to take the day off of work. We packed the car Sunday night and had a pretty smooth morning. Ellie had a one-hour window during which she was allowed to move in, and we hit campus within about ten minutes of the start of the window.
The first stop was the football stadium parking lot, where she received her Purdue student ID, her room key, and a packet of other documents. That went smoothly, and we were on our way to her dorm. I expected heavy traffic, but it seems that we avoided the worst of it by not moving in on Sunday, and also by arriving early in the morning. We made good time getting across campus, and when we arrived at the dorm there was someone there to tell us where to park the car while we unloaded.
There was a Facebook group for the parents of newly admitted students, and posts there helped me to know what to expect. There were many students at Ellie’s dorm to help us get her things out of the van and up to her room. They had many carts, and it took three plus several people hand-carrying things to get all her stuff in. And thank goodness for elevators! My freshman dorm only had stairs, and there were no move-in helpers back then, so my overwhelming memory of my first night on campus was legs that ached so badly I had to put a pillow under them.
When we got to Ellie’s room, we had to unload the things into the hallway, because her roommate was already there installing a carpet. They quickly finished, and we started getting everything into the room. Ellie and her roommate took off to registration, and the parents unloaded what we could. She took a ridiculous amount of clothing, so I spent most of my time folding or hanging up clothes. When the girls returned, they set up their beds. Soon we were unloaded enough to get rid of suitcases and boxes, and we headed to lunch.
The restaurant we went to on campus was very unprepared for the busy weekend they had. There were two people working the entire large restaurant, and they were out of a ton of food. It probably took us over an hour to get our food, but we had a nice time visiting while we waited. After lunch we shopped for Purdue merchandise at a couple bookstores, then it was time to drop Ellie off. We didn’t even go back up to her room. We just got out of the car, hugged her, and watched her walk away.
This is the point where I expected the waterworks to begin. For me. I expected to bawl like a baby. But I didn’t. I was sad, but not terribly emotional. We drove home with one fewer kid living in our house. Then, as if to prove there’s a silver lining to everything, we found that Ellie’s bed wasn’t going to go empty after all!
