SMCM Move-In Day

The day finally came when our first-born is leaving the nest and moving in to his dorm for college. We've been getting in all the Owen time we can this past week, with 18th birthday celebrations (steak at St. Anslem), one last EPA softball game (Owen hit a home run!), lots of Doctor Who (we finished the Capaldi era!), and of course family cuddle time before packing up the car. But I'm not sure you can every get enough Owen time.

When the morning finally arrived we hit the road early to arrive at Owen's dorm in time for his 9:30am move in window. Unfortunately, so did seemingly every other freshman's family (except maybe for Owen's roommate Theo) and so there was a bit of a wait to actually get to his dorm. Once there (and once we finally located the email with his actual room number), the St. Mary's Move-In Crew helpfully unloaded our car for us and carried Owen's belongings to the his hall. 

We quickly started wiping things down, moving things around, and putting stuff away. We ran into a couple of hiccups with his refrigerator (too big to put under his bed, not a long enough cord to plug in anywhere else) and in hanging things on the wall (we didn't have the correct adhesive for Owen's Zelda canvas) so after we got things initially set up and briefly met Owen's roommate and his parents, we headed to the bookstore to pick up those items and a book Noa wanted.

We headed back and got the last thing put away and then went to the dining hall for lunch. After another stop at the bookstore to get a few things off Owen's syllabi (The Gulag Archipelago, Suicide of the West, and Intro to Macroeconomics), we took an extended tour of campus, including the waterfront.

By the time we headed back to Owen's dorm, they were getting ready for a hall meeting and were officially kicking parents out. We got in our last hugs and a final selfie before Owen walked us out the door. We didn't cry at the time, which was kind of amazing (though likely because I had cried profusely the night before while I wrote Owen a letter, and Allen and Noa being of stoic, Fawcett stock), but it was a pretty quiet drive home which was mostly spent wondering what Owen was doing now. 

Which was literally going over the rules of the dorm, but figuratively starting a whole new and exciting chapter, that we happily toasted to at the local wine bar.

(To see all the move-in pictures, click here.)