Another Long Day

Okay, this one's going up unedited because there's a decent chance that I won't even be awake yet when it posts. Basically: better day, a lot fewer issues, but still very, very long. 

As planned, we popped up and grabbed breakfast at the hotel, then drove over to Firstborn's new dorm, where we were greeted by a pack of upperclassmen who grabbed his stuff out of our vehicles and got it all up to his room. We then managed to get our vehicles removed to an outer parking lot, so other parents could do the same. 

Then we set about trying to get the room into shape, which meant opening all the boxes, sorting out items... and realizing that there were really only three full-sized drawers and one desk drawer in the entire room (not counting the, um, shelf? at the top of the closets). Firstborn's room is built to be a (pretty tight) double and he's occupying it as a single, so it had a good amount of room, but the furnishings were a dresser with three drawers, a desk, and a side-table with another drawer and a storage space underneath -- all three set up as a single desktop underneath the loft bed. (The loft bed looked rickety as hell, but I think it'll hold; it also completely lacked any sort of steps or ladder.) So, we did some creative arranging and Beautiful Wife -- an absolute life-saver -- started making a list of other things that we needed to purchase for his room, starting with shelves and some kind of low cabinet that could hold the microwave. 

By the time we got all that sorted out, it was time to go meet Beautiful Wife's aunt, whom I'll call T, for lunch. You may wonder why we would interrupt the dorm-room setup to go do this when we had only one day to finish; I know I did. As it happens, T is an absolute treasure: delighted to see us, absolutely thrilled to meet Firstborn as a near-adult instead of a kindergartener, and well-connected with the local community. She had some ideas about how to get the medical staples out of the back of Firstborn's head, and was more than willing to accompany him whenever this happened. Plus, the food was really good. 

After that, we headed over to the local Target, which was absolutely swarming with incoming freshmen and their hollow-eyed parents. We went down Beautiful Wife's list, and I found a low cabinet which would fill in the space beside the refrigerator and a matching set of shelves, both of which were intended for garage/workroom/tool storage deployment, so they had sort of a cool warehouse aesthetic, were cheaper than the things intended for room furnishings, and also were much easier to assemble. Beautiful Wife managed, through what I can only consider a effort of pure will, to find a small and completely suitable card table, plus a couple of rugs and some cushions to complete her vision for the room. (I will note for the record here that I did not have a vision for the room; I just wanted to add places to put shit.) We checked out, taking advantage of a New Student Discount that Beautiful Wife knew about (and in the process endeared ourselves to the mother/daughter pair in front of us, who recognized Firstborn because they'd done the tour together and were thrilled to have a 20% discount to justify some extra purchases) then drove back to the campus. 

By then, though, it was time for the Convocation, which... I am bad at describing rituals and ceremonies. They don't do much for me, and I find them tedious. Beautiful Wife, however, tells me that she found it an emotional experience, and that it gave her kind of closure -- like, we were really here, this was really done, Firstborn was really getting started here. So this isn't a knock on the school or the Convocation, it's just One Of Those Me-Things. I will note that the invocation at the end was aggressively non-denominational and as generically religious as anything I've ever seen (while still being effective), enough so that ending it with the much-more culturally specific "Amen" was actually jarring for me. So really, well done on that whole thing.

In theory, after this, we were supposed to make our goodbyes and leave, but... yeah. Furniture. Still in the van, yet. 

So we brought the new purchases up to his room, and I assembled the shelves while Firstborn assembled the cabinet and Beautiful Wife unwrapped and arranged the rest of it. The three-step step-stool (which Firstborn described as a step-step-step-stool) allowed us to pull the broken-down boxes from the back of one of the closets and store them in the luggage space above the closets; it was later positioned to help him get up to his bed. Once we were finished -- amidst a certain amount of fuss over exactly how to arrange everything for the Optimal Dorm Room Experience(tm) -- we had about twenty minutes left before Firstborn was due for an orientation/socializing dinner, and it was definitely time to go. The furniture was arranged, there was at least one poster on the wall, and the room was comfortably his. The microwave fit perfectly atop the cabinet -- I'm still proud of finding something with exactly the measurements we needed to fit it into its little nook beside the refrigerator -- and the work- and play-spaces were arranged to his liking. So we said our goodbyes, Beautiful Wife got some pictures, and I grabbed the Giant Box Of Trash and carried it down to the dumpster. 

I could make some noises about how this was all such a Profound Emotional Experience, but if we're being honest I was too busy doing it to have much in the way of feelings about it. As I may have mentioned earlier, I'll probably do my actual emotional processing in a couple of days, so it's probably a good thing that I don't have to be back at work until Friday. (New Job takes a while to build up vacation time, but they also hand you a week of it the moment you start so as to cover situations exactly like this, because they're not idiots.) 

Then we turned around and drove all the way back home, because as much as it might have been easier to stop halfway and find a place to stay the night, I really wanted to just put a pin in this whole exercise and mark it as Done. 

So... Good day? I think so. Long day? Definitely. Emotional day? Yeah? Kind of? But also definitely, in some areas? I think we left Firstborn in a room that he can be comfortable in and has kind of marked as his own (which is a lot more important and a lot less superficial than it might sound). I think he was feeling a lot better after assembling the cabinet almost completely on his own, too. I know for a goddamned fact that we weren't the only parents in that particular emotional space, because we could see them all around us and also because we were far from the last to leave. 

This was the kind of quest where I really feel like after all that I should be able to level up, but of course I have to take a Long Rest in order for that to happen. So, on that happy note, good night! I hope you're all already sleeping well by now. You'll see this in the morning, or later, and I may even still be asleep when you do. 

Ye Gods, I love my wife.