Back to the Business of Blogging: A Golden Knight

Carnegie Melon University 

We used to sit on the floor, he and I, and practice our alphabet and sounds. I had bought a few workbooks to get him through that year of wanting to start school so badly and having missed the cutoff date by 3 months. He was more than ready to be in school and he absolutely HATED that they wouldn't let him go and couldn't understand things like age cutoffs. If he was ready, they should just let him be there. He's always been a very rational sort of person.Even now, if you want to know something, but you don't ask the question in just the right way, he won't give you the answer you are looking for. He will get up for school on a scheduled day off, even though the rest of us have been talking about it for weeks, because no one reminded him about it the night before, and how come we didn't tell him that there was no school that day? If you want to know the quiet truth of my heart, I'm a little more than worried about how this boy is going to manage college.

Accepted into the Class of 2017

I thought I would have more time to get ready for it. I remember when he started high school and someone mentioned about how pretty soon he'd be filling out college applications and I laughed thinking it was in four years and that seemed so far away. Not only have these three years gone by quickly, but THIS year is going by far too fast. In that fall we visited Carnegie Melon, and then took another weekend and visited RIT and Clarkson University. He also applied to Lawrence Tech, and dropped MIT off his list after our visit to CMU. We filled out the FASFA form and the CSS Profile and he wrote his essays and I helped edit them, and then we waited. He got into Lawrence Tech, and then Clarkson, and RIT. I know he was relieved, because he honestly felt that he had a snowball's chance in hell at getting in anywhere. Last year was rough on my boy, and as a result some of his grades suffered from it. His references from school spoke to the situation, as did he in his interviews, and colleges are understanding about life and I tried to tell him that, but he was worried regardless. It took longer to hear back from CMU, which was his number one school. 5,000 +/- students applied for 126 seats in the freshmen Computer Science program. He knew his odds were slim, and figured that he wasn't going, so when the small envelope came in the mail that day, neither of us were surprised, though we both were a little sad.

I ordered him a sweatshirt  after his CMU letter came

Clarkson University has been pursuing him since his Junior year. They gave him an academic award which translated in a rather nice scholarship for outstanding achievements and he almost didn't bother to look at their school. Once he did however, he was really impressed with what they had to offer, and more so after our visit there. They moved up to number two on his list, and so after his letter from CMU came, he confirmed his decision to go there and major in Computer Science in the class of 2017. Having somewhere to go has taken a huge weight off his mind, and added a big weight to mine. Sending in the confirmation deposit really drove the whole thing home. My boy is leaving in 5 months (less actually, as new student registration is August 23) to start a new chapter of his life, without me. I'm learning how pride and sadness can coexist with each other, and that each related event is going to tug at my  heartstrings just a little bit. The purchases that are starting to fill the "Taking to College" tub, having to measure him for the Health Form that the college asked him to email back just this week, filling out the promissory notes for the financial aid loans from the government .. it's all one more reminder that our time is so short. I can only pray that we have done our jobs well, and that he is ready to go off and face this new chapter of his life, but I'm not quite ready yet.