First: it’s hard to jump back into blogging after a long absence. I want to catch up on every single thing I wanted to blog about but didn’t, but that would take about 400 hours. So I won’t. I’ll just start with today.

Our older daughter is somewhere in that landscape above, in her new town that she loves, where she’ll be living as of August 26th. She has been at orientation, has signed up for her fall classes, gotten her official ID, slept on a hard mattress (”Can I bring my own mattress to college?”) and generally gotten very excited about her new life.

She met with her advisor. She pored through the 500-page course catalog and picked classes that she’s interested in, which I gather has been quite the heady experience. I have to say, I’m kinda jealous. When I went to college, I entered a very rigid program that had like one elective every year. I was pretty locked in and they told ME what I was going to take, and when. It didn’t go so well. But here she is, with literally thousands of options. It must be a little mind boggling.

It’s weird, getting text messages throughout the day. She discussed her options with someone named Jill (the advisor), not with us. She emailed us the final decisions. They look great. But we’re not part of that decision making loop. At all.

She took a small step into a potential major, something she’s never really mentioned before. I know this can and likely will change a lot between now and when she’s done, but… This could be my new life, she texted. It’s all kind of awesome and sort of incomprehensible too.