Moving Our Daughter Into Her College Dorm During COVID

This isn’t going to be a very long post. I really just wanted to get these thoughts down and have them saved for us to read and remember “someday”.

We moved Ellie back into her dorm on Sunday for her sophomore year at Olivet. I was doing some reading, writing, and editing on the ride home (before we broke down and added five hours to our trip…but that’s a post for another day) and queued up this post I wrote on the day after move-in last year. (click here to read “time for her to fly…”, written August 2019). The emotions were all the same, but the mood…the mood was so very different.

If you’ve already moved your son or daughter in for their return to campus…you probably know exactly what I mean. If you haven’t moved your son or daughter in for a return year…you’ll soon find out what I mean.

Same, but different.

She had to sign up first for a wave and then for a particular time slot within that wave. She then had to be cleared and approved by Student Services. She checked in at a central location…not her residence hall…and could only enter the building once the student in front of her had exited. She was only allowed to have two family members with her to help. She could not move in at the same time as her roommate. And she, nor we, were allowed to leave her room without a mask. None of this really surprised me, given our global situation, and I’m grateful for the careful thought and diligent execution put into student check-in this year.

Then things started to look very different.

At check-in, along with her room inspection check-in list and her room key, she was also given an OC provided COVID care package. But this care package was packed not with OC car decals and pencils and lanyards, but with OC face masks, social distancing rules and guidelines, and hand sanitizer. And the residence hall. She was on the second floor, not the first, this year, and Mike and I didn’t realize there was not an elevator until the day before. But despite all of these changes to the check-in routine, the biggest difference was not anything we could see or touch or do anything about. The biggest difference was the silence. It was move-in day on a college campus. And it was strangely, deafeningly quiet. So very quiet. Her suitemate was the only other person we saw and we heard one…ONE…other voice further down the hall. That’s it.

It took us about the same three hours to get her settled in that it did last year. I’m pretty sure I spoke the same words of advice I did last year. I hugged her goodbye just as tightly (maybe a little more) as I did last year. And my tears fell for about the same number of miles toward home as they did last year.

Two and one-half days later, she is once again loving it and we are once again missing her.

Everything so much the same…but everything so very, very different.