BYU

He already has the pennants hanging in his room. I’ve got a “Y” magnet on the fridge. We’ve been ready for this for a while. A week ago today Garyn got an email telling him he’d been accepted to Brigham Young University.
Back on our roadtrip out to St. George for Thanksgiving in 2021, we arranged to stop at BYU so Garyn could see the campus and meet some people in the Engineering department. It went swimmingly and he started to think of BYU as the top college choice for his inventorengineering training. Fast forward two years. After bugging him to actually finish his essays and apply already, he did. February 19th 2024 seemed like ages away and we’d never actually find out where he’d be going to college. BYU Idaho accepted him a month ago. But still we waited.
Actually we were super busy living life, as per the norm, and the time flew and suddenly we knew the next stop for him.
Now we can take hypothetical logistical musings and make actual plans about moving him across the country.
Here’s the plan: The third week in June (For anyone who is counting, that’s two weeks after we get back from Denmark and a few days after Neil gets back from a week in San Francisco) we will drive to Utah as a family. We will haul all Garyn’s stuff that he is bringing for life in the dorm in a U-Haul trailer. BYU has a program called “Summer Bridge” that our friend told us about that was a fabulous experience for his son. Garyn will start the beginning of the summer with a group of new freshmen. They will take two of the same classes all together and do activities as a group. It’s a really nice way to ease into college life. Then he’ll be a pro come Fall and as a bonus he’ll get a small scholarship for attending the Summer Bridge Program. Winning! After we get him settled over the weekend (and maybe visit some family) we will drive home. Minus Garyn.

He is so excited and so ready. We are so excited and I guess as ready as we can be. Corra has expressed concerns about life post Garyn living here and we keep talking about and exploring what life will be like. Ultimately we conclude that things will be very weird for a while, and that overall we are all going to be ok eventually. In fact, we are all going to be great in this new chapter.
I am so proud of Garyn. He’s had a roller coaster of a highschool career, but is coming out either Valedictorian or Salutatorian. He is a kind human being and manages his life well enough that I’m not really worried about him launching into the great unknown. I’m going to miss him and I’m not thinking about that until the end of June. At which point I’ll dive into way too many projects to distract me until life finds its new normal.