Yep, that’s my dad. With the tiara on.
In grade school, family nights were like mini Christmases. We got to bring our parents into our school, the magical place we got to learn, eat snacks and take naps at every day.
These totally awesome after-hours events were spent in tiny gym/cafeteria hybrids that reeked delightfully of a combination of French toast sticks and P.E. gym shoes. We’d eat Little Debbie snack cakes, popcorn and show our parents how well we could read books that were A WHOLE READING LEVEL above our current grade. Like I said, IT WAS AWESOME.
Then, at some point we blinked and we were 16.
In high school, any time our parents visited school elicited a slight panic. Whether it was for parent-teacher conferences or sports awards nights, it always made us a little uncomfortable that our parents were in the same place we did all of our cool teenage high school things, like texting in class and hugging our crushes in the hallway.
Now we’re in college. And this weekend is family weekend. And we’re even more excited than we were to read Junie B. Jones to our moms while eating Cosmic Brownies—which translates to really frickin’ excited.
As most of us have read in several Her Campus or Cosmo articles, being friends with our families somehow becomes a whole lot easier in college. I’m not really sure why, exactly, but I have a few guesses.
1. Because we miss them. Absence truly does make the heart grow fonder.
2. Because (sadly) we’re getting older and, as weird and disturbing as it is, can relate to them more.
And
3. Because college makes us realize who we are and feel more comfortable with that person, and, in turn, more comfortable sharing that with our parents.
Anyway, for whatever reason, we love our families even more than we used to or thought we ever would. And while family weekend lets all of us embrace that, I still don’t think that’s the only reason why we’re so excited for it.
For me, a true appreciation for family weekend didn’t come until my junior year. And yes, while showing my parents around my house and forcing them to partake in some, um, college style fun, that wasn’t really what made family weekend at SAU so freaking cool.
What makes family weekend such an incomparable experience is that it isn’t just a weekend for you and your family to enjoy together. It’s about taking our genetic families and our school families and combining them into one giant SAU family. It’s taking a soccer family and introducing them to your roommate’s family, and then cooking out with your neighbors’ family, and all going to the men’s volleyball game with the rest of your townhouse’s family— and then maybe forcing them all to go to Rookies afterwards.
A little confusing and crowded, yes, but so much fun.
Family, to me, is a group of people that has an inexplicable connection of love and joy—relationships that may or may not be bound by blood. There is no greater joy than taking the family you have built at SAU and introducing them to the family that built you. See photos below of my mom and roommate taking selfies.
So even though some of us might have visitors this weekend and some of us might not, I urge everyone to celebrate this weekend. We’re all fam[ily] here.
*We made our moms take this photo*