No Rest For The Froggy

Our daughter, a freshman at TCU, seems to be settling into college quite nicely. While several of her contemporaries used the long holiday weekend as a reason to come home for a few days, our little Frog apparently never considered it. Why would she? Her school’s nationally-ranked football team was playing in Cowboys Stadium against Oregon State.


She made the short trip from Ft. Worth to Arlington in a large group. They were set up to have a great time no matter what happened.


I’m sure that since her team won a thrilling game, things were about as exciting as she could have hoped. It’s a great way to kick start her college career, no question about it.


She has decided that sorority life is not for her and she has dropped her bid. From a distance, I can’t be sure what went wrong there, but her mother and I trust her judgment. Everything we’ve heard and seen indicates she’s making friends quite easily.

She’s been active socially. Don’t ask me about academics. I guess it would be bad form to post grades on a social networking site. Since that’s pretty much how we keep up with her, I guess we will have to wait until Family Weekend until we get an idea about grades. That's okay. It's just a couple of weeks away.


But, hey? Who’s worried about school when there’s so much fun to be had.

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A Rush of Adrenaline in Ft. Worth

Less than a week into our daughter’s college experience, she’s already reporting tremendous fun, a loss of her voice and a satisfying kind of fatigue. She’s been going through sorority rush, which has kept her extraordinarily busy and has severely limited either her ability or her willingness to communicate with her parents.

In late-night phone calls, she reports that the rush process seems to be going well for her. There are several sets of young women she seems to like very much. I don’t know a lot about it, but I’m told the process is so intense because everyone involved wants to make good decisions about the group of people with whom they will be closely identified potentially for the rest of their lives. Okay, that makes sense.
My wife is on the edge of her seat as evenings wear on, awaiting word on the day’s activities. A friend of hers whose daughter is at LSU is so distracted and anxious about her daughter’s rush in Baton Rouge that she can barely concentrate on work. Me? I’m grateful the gravity of all this is lost on me. I listen in with great interest, and then just tell my daughter I love her. She’ll have friends. That’s the kind of person she is. The significance of the label she might wear is lost on me.
We are getting text messages from people in far-flung outposts who want to know how rush is going. All of them are sorority women, of course. One close friend who lives in Texas is pulling for a particular sorority to nab our daughter so she can go to her initiation.
Soon enough, we will know and hopefully there will be cause for celebration throughout the land.
There’s an alarming lack of photos being produced, and so we still are reliant on Twitter and text messages to have any sense of what’s happening. Reading between the lines from 1:00 a.m. microblogs, we can assume that some pranksters rousted freshman girls from their beauty sleep overnight.
I guess somebody set off a fire alarm just in time for the dorm to be evacuated as the lawn sprinklers came on.
Don’t you know she’s having fun? There will be great stories to tell, and this is just the start. Speaking of starting, when do classes begin? Oh, that’s next week! We’ll see how much fun that is, won’t we?

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A Sweaty Start to College Life

On this, our daughter’s first full day away from home, we are quickly learning to monitor her activities from afar. That’s the magic of text messages, Facebook and Twitter. We realize we only will see what she wants us to see, but so far everything’s positive.
From those short dispatches, we can determine that she has said good-bye to home, hello to her new sleeping arrangements and presumably had pizza at Mellow Mushroom.
She evidently went to church and then went shopping and is loving college so far, and that’s just in the first 24 hours since she said good-bye to her parents.
The journey from home to dorm was arduous and steamy.

Two SUV’s were packed with her essentials, and off we went, only to be delayed for almost an hour on the interstate. Along with thousands of other motorists, somewhere in East Texas we were at dead stop while an accident was cleared. We became philosophical while we waited, deciding it’s better to be delayed by a wreck than to actually be involved in it.
We arrived at TCU in the hottest part of the August afternoon, and in the company of many similar families became supersaturated with our own sweat as we hauled everything into her room while battling triple-digit temperatures.


Her roommate’s father was there and welcomed us to Texas, making a comment about the heat. I said, “Hey, we’re from Louisiana. This is nothing. Come visit us. We’ll match your heat and raise you 20-30 points of humidity.” I’m not sure he believed me.
We piled everything into the room and arranged the furniture for the young ladies.

Getting the beds assembled and made up quite quickly became the highest priority. I’m not sure why, exactly; but by the time we got to that point, the other father had hit the road. As the only male in close quarters, I knew enough to simply follow instructions. My wife snapped a photo of the bed and e-mailed it to her mother. Why my sweet mother-in-law needed an on-the-spot report with photos about the bed just escapes me…but, hey, you know what I’m saying here?


After that, suitcases were unpacked and empty boxes were taken to a trash pile and suddenly there was nothing left for Dad to do. As if by magic, Frog Camp friends showed up on cue and it became abundantly obvious it was time for the parents to hit the highway. As I hugged my daughter good-bye, the preppy kid I had met moments before asked, “Isn’t there supposed to be crying right now?” I thought, “Keep your topsiders on, Biff,” but I just smiled and said, “Don’t worry. There will be.”
That prediction came true, but the ride home wasn’t as emotional as I had expected. For the moment, it feels like she’s just gone to camp or something. So, check with me in a couple of weeks.
I’m hoping the adjustment will be easier if we are convinced she’s happy. We’re willing to believe it as long as she keeps posting happy thoughts.

We are keeping an eye on her from a distance, but everybody knows she’s less than four hours away by car. I’m positive about that, too.

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Long, Lingering Hugs and Torrents of Tears

A steady stream of well-wishers has filtered through the family home on this, the last day before our daughter leaves for college. There have been tearful farewells with friends, as well as a nice dinner with the grandparents. At the end of the evening, a smile could not hide the puffy eyes.


Her brother has set a personal record for hanging around the house, saying repeatedly, “this is just so weird. I can’t really grasp that she’s leaving.”
Well, get a grip, because she is.

I’ve been saying for more than a year that this would be terrible for me, and that has turned out to be accurate. I’m convinced that I’m better than I might have been if I had not spread the misery out over all this time. My wife, a “live in the moment” kind of person, is just plain weepy. My sweet mother-in-law left the house in tears.
The college girl is ready to go. She was awake until 2:00 a.m. talking on webcams with some of her buddies who have already moved to campus. It’s the process of saying good-bye that has taken its toll.


There was a long lunch earlier in the day with a group of girls, some lingering hugs and rivers of tears.
The Girl Across the Street, who is the closest thing our daughter has to a sister, has been hanging around, squeezing a few more moments of togetherness into the final few hours.


Sure, she’ll be home for holidays and summers, but it’s a safe bet that after tonight, things around here will never again be quite the same.

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There She Goes Again

Time is starting to compress on the family as move-in day for our daughter at Texas Christian University draws near. She made her college decision early and has exuded calm confidence about it from the start. Now, reality seems to be setting in. She and her friends have been comparing schedules and have come to the sobering realization that the actual number of days they have to spend together is alarmingly small. She has been closely-knit with many girls since middle school, and the inevitable unraveling of that long-established support system has become unsettling.
The days are diminished by their late-summer travel schedules. My daughter boarded a flight this morning to participate in an official TCU function dubbed “Frog Camp.”
She’s traveling alone to Colorado for an “Alpine” experience with more than a dozen people she does not know. That’s the idea: twelve incoming freshmen, a couple of upperclassmen and a faculty member spend several days together in intense togetherness. The plan is to create a support group before you arrive on campus. It seems like a great idea, and we are told the program has a long history of achieving its goals.
She had many Frog Camp options and chose Colorado for reasons of her own. I suspect a chance to escape the heat had something to do with it. As her mother drove her to the airport, she felt confident about the camp but a little nervous about close connections. The double meaning there is quite intentional. What will she do in the Colorado wilderness if her bag doesn’t make the transition from one plane to another? What kind of people will she meet when she arrives? How will this week affect the course of her life? Perhaps profoundly, maybe not at all.
She certainly will know more about herself when she gets home. The thing is, she will only be home for a couple of weeks before she’s off again, this time for a fresh start in a whole new world. Hopefully there, time will begin to expand for her once again.

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Feelin' Froggy

There is a great sense of relief and dread in our house. A college decision for our daughter is final and official. TCU, it shall be. For months, she has been leaning heavily toward attending Texas Christian University in Ft. Worth, and now the deed is done.
A scholarship offer has been formally accepted, registration and housing fees have been paid. Offers from other schools have been politely declined. A roommate has been identified. The relief comes from having a major life decision behind us. The dread comes from the certainty that our daughter will be leaving home in four months.
Her mother cries just thinking about it.
Preparations are earnestly under way. In fact, the ladies are in Ft. Worth this weekend in an effort to get College Life rolling. Shopping is planned. There is something to do with sorority rush, but I'm not plugged into all that. I know that one of my daughter's friends, a TCU student, has invited her to a party on campus tonight. (Yikes! I know, I don't want to think about it.)The future roommates and their mothers are planning a get-together.
So, I guess it's time to load up on TCU gear and hope that the football team, which played in the Fiesta Bowl earlier this year, will be good again. I may be spending more time in Dallas-Ft. Worth over the next few years than I ever truly anticipated.
TCU seems lilke a wildcard choice, doesn't it? I've been asked often "Why TCU?" I don't have a simple answer. We visited many university campuses and that's where she feels she belongs. She has a strong sense of certainty about it, and how can you argue with that? Sometimes, you have to go with your gut.
So...Go, Frogs!

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