Lisa Endlich's Blog, page 353

My Daughter Is Now A Wife and This Goodbye is the Hardest

And just like that, she is gone. Oh sure, she had left before, a hundred times. First, to the church nursery, then to summer camp, then on a mission trip to Romania, and then out of state to college, then after college graduation a trip to Europe, a visit to her boyfriend in North Carolina, then an internship to Thailand. But she always came back.

Today she left because she was married this weekend. The 22-year-old Bride and Groom come to our house after their honeymoon to grab her final bags...

19 Important Things You Will Hear on Every Campus Tour

I have just returned from a spate of college visits and as this is my third go round, I couldn’t help but notice a lot sameness in each college information session and campus tour. And don’t get me wrong, I loved every one of our bright-eyed and spirited tour guides, but there’s no denying the repetition in the presentations from school to school.

Here are the nineteen things that you will absolutely, without a doubt, hear either in the information session or from the tour guide on EVERY sing...

How to Survive the College Application Process: 10 Dos and Don’ts

With a high school junior, I’m in the midst of the college application process and it’s a process that can drive even the most level-headed of us to madness. Here are some tips for getting through the next eighteen months with some semblance of your sanity intact.

How to Survive the College Application Process

1. Do provide guidance to your child based on who he is, and not on who you thought he would or should be.

2. Do realize it’s about them, not about you. That bears repeating; this is n...

Here are the 10 Things I Wish I’d Known Before My Kids Left for College

Are your kids leaving for college soon? Here are 10 things we wish we’d known…

1. For the first couple of months after “drop off” don’t do anything.

Don’t make a ton of plans, or big decisions, or commit to anything. The lead-up to helping your youngest move into their new digs is exhausting – physically and emotionally. I thought I’d want to jump into a million things to distract me from the emptiness of our home but I realized that I was just tired, spent, exhausted, wiped out.

I felt like...

10 Things To Say To Your Kids When Their Hearts Are Broken

I’ll never forget the night my freshman year in college when the guy I thought I was going to marry told me he’d met someone else. It was only a little over a month into the school year, and I was sitting on the floor of the bathroom I shared with my suitemates, the cord from the wall phone in my dorm room stretched as far as it would reach. Hunched on the cold tile, through my rather hysterical sobbing, I heard him tell me we were over.

At the time, I thought I couldn’t possibly know any sor...

I Thought About Life After Kids and Didn’t Recognize My Marriage

The realization that my son would be heading to college hit me hard one summer afternoon.

As the reality of my son leaving home washed over me, I found myself feeling panicky. Not because I was nervous about the inevitable tearful goodbye in his dorm room. My panic wasn’t because the thought of sending him off on his own made me want to sit on his bed and cry.

No, I was feeling panicky because I didn’t recognize my marriage.

Years of frustrations and stress from child rearing, job strain and...

20 Things I’d Tell My High School Self

A friend tagged me in a post on Facebook and my face stared in disbelief as I read her comments.

“Hi everyone! It’s that time! That’s right: it’s been 25 years since we graduated from high school and we are planning a reunion this summer!”

That can’t possibly be correct.

Twenty-five years?

Has it really been a quarter of a century since I sat next to my classmates on a June day, listening to the valedictorian tell us to chase our dreams with gusto? Had it really been that long since I sat wit...

Here is the One Thing I Always Believe About My Kids

No one remembers how the ritual began, really. It was just one of those ideas that little boys come up with out of the blue; full of silliness and a dash of good old-fashioned competition.

One day, my oldest son decided that he and his brothers would have a footrace against the car of our departing guests. On the count of three, the trio took off as the car left the curb and ran their hearts out until they reached the end of our short block. The goal was to reach the stop sign before our visi...

7 Ways to Make Freshman Orientation the Best Start for College

I was sitting in traffic the first time I felt it, and then again when I was setting the table for family pizza night. I have come to know this brief fluttering kind of heartache. It is a tangle of love and excitement mixed with some despair. It is knowing that next fall, my daughter is leaving for college.

Over time so much of the excellent mom advice I received has proven to be true. There will be amazing growth during your teen’s senior year, and there will be senioritis too. And the colle...

Here’s Why I Loved Being a Teen in the ’80s

I know I shouldn’t compare my teen years in the ’80s and ’90s to my kids’ teens years but I can’t help it. It’s too much fun to look back and see how my friends, sisters and I spent our time versus how my kids spend their time.

I know some say kids these days are spoiled and have no idea how good they have it, but we all remember our parents saying the same to us and so on and so forth. Clearly, this will be a thing until the end of time.

Prom

When I was a teen in the late ’80s and early ’90...