Dorm Room Decor

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Dorm Room Decor

This post is sponsored by Minted.com.

The time has finally come: our firstborn goes to college next week, 2,735 miles away from home.

We are excited for her. The school she’s attending in the Keystone State is one I used to drive past all the time on my own college journey from Rochester to U Penn, set up high on a hill. All I knew about it during those years was “that campus is beautiful,” which either or both my parents would say whenever we shot past it headed south. I’ve still never set foot on it, but when my husband took our daughter there last year for a visit they both came home starry-eyed (and raving about the dining hall food.)

When it turned out that the university offers both the mechanical engineering and ballet that she’s interested in pursuing, it all fell into place. That makes it much easier to know that she is going to spend the next four years living a short 40 hours’ drive away from me. (True, she is only 3 hours’ drive from my East Coast family, and only 1.5 hours from my sister’s office. Believe that I figured all of that in when I threw my unvarnished support behind her choice.)

Out here in Cali, not many people have heard of her school, much as I had never heard of the small liberal arts colleges here in the Golden State when I first got here. Pomona? Harvey Mudd? Claremont McKenHuh? But our kid spent this summer working at camp on the East Coast, and when we visited her a few weeks into that job, one of the first things she said to me was, “Mom! People here have heard of my school!”

That shift in perspective – that chance to really understand how life can look different from the right-hand side of the country – is one of the reasons we are okay with sending her off to the East Coast for school. Not forever, maybe, but four years. And if that turns into forever, well, she was born to parents who moved cross country ourselves twenty years ago. My husband and I can hardly blame her if she decides to do the same, retracing our moving van route.

Still, I know she is proud of her Cali roots. And in the dorm room she’ll share with roommates from across the country and world over the next four years, we want to help her rep her state and keep us close in spirit. But given the already gigantic pile of goods we have bivouacked at her grandparents’ house in Rochester, plus the one is steadily forming in the center of her bedroom floor, we need to do so in as compact a manner as possible.

So I am completely here for the framed state-shaped photo gifts from Minted.com. How cute is this California version? Answer: as cute as the one for your state. (Bonus for Michiganders: the mitten shape and UP means you get FOUR photos.) It’s chic, but it’s also subliminal, come back, see?

For those of us praying from some semblance of national unity in 2016, as well as an expeditious end to this election season, there’s one in the shape of These Ostensibly United States of America.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg for dorm room décor at Minted.com – there are also and skylines, you could use to commemorate a standout campus landmark, and this customizable funky state license plate print. Forget to give someone a graduation gift back in June? No you didn’t. You were just considering your options (that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.) Any of these would make really thoughtful gifts for a kid moving across town or across the country onto a college campus.