Our daughter, Valerie, has a case of buyer’s remorse.

Steve moved Valerie into her dorm room at Chapman University in Southern California six days ago and she is questioning her decision to go away to college.

“Oh my gosh, what was I thinking? I’m living with total strangers, I miss my room, my friends and I really miss the cats. Maybe Chapman isn’t worth what it is costing me in student loans and going to the JC and living at home wouldn’t have been so bad after all.”

Plus, she is shocked because she thought that Chapman attracted smart kids, yet there are freshman doing stupid things like drinking to the point of passing out at the orientation dance and setting off the fire alarms in the dorm. How high school can you get?

Unfortunately, I can’t speak to her from personal experience about the process of going away to college because I lived at home the entire time I was in school. When I finally did move out, I wasn’t “moving to” San Francisco as much as I was “escaping from” Salt Lake City.

Steve, however, can relate his experience of enlisting in the army to what Valerie is going through now. He told her how he remembers waking up on Day Two of basic training and thinking, “What have I gotten myself into? How am I going to make it through 1,094 more days of this?”

He told her that things seem bleak because absolutely everything is new to her. There isn’t one aspect of her daily routine that is the same as it was a week ago. And just because her fantasy of meeting her roommates and having instant BFFs didn’t happen doesn’t mean that she isn’t in a good place and won’t find lifelong friends.

Steve went on to tell her that basic training – which is meant to make your life hell – wasn’t that all that bad once he made some buddies and settled into the routine. He is certain that her time at Chapman –a place where she is valued or they wouldn’t have given her a scholarship – will be very positive. She just needs to give it more than a week. Once she starts going to art class and joining some clubs that interest her, she is certain to meet other kids with the same sensibilities and she will feel like she fits in.

In the meantime, I’m going to take the advice of parents who have been through the process of sending kids off to college and send Valerie regular care packages stuffed with photos of kitties, art supplies and protein bars. And instead of phone calls that can turn into whine-fests from her, we’ll stick with sending texts and chatting on FaceBook so I can be encouraging while keeping some distance between us. It won’t help her if we talk on the phone and I get sucked into the same depressed place that she is.

We feel confident that she is on a path that will lead to many good things over the next four years; however, the first few steps can be a little rocky.

When does 18 years seem like a very short amount of time?

When it’s the day before your daughter leaves for college. That’s when the 18 years spent with your child just doesn’t seem like enough time. I know you never stop being parents no matter how old your children are, however, the time when we can have a direct impact on her life has passed; when it comes to aspects of parenting that we wished we had done differently, there won’t be any more do-overs. She’s moving onto her own life now. How did it happen so fast?

I can’t help but feel sentimental as we help Valerie get packed up for school; Steve and she will leave Monday for Chapman University in Orange County so she can get moved in and oriented before school starts next week.

As part of preparing to say goodbye, we had the opportunity to spend an evening last week with some friends who have known Valerie all her life. All of these people had written a short letter to Valerie after she was born. My friend put all these letters in a book which they gave me at Valerie’s baby shower when she was about a month old.

Reading the notes aloud almost 18 years to the day after they were written was very emotional for me because at the time, Valerie had already been through some traumatic medical situations although only she was only a few weeks old.

You see, Valerie spent the first week of her life in intensive care. There were a variety of factors that had caused her to be transported by ambulance from the hospital in Novato to UCSF Neonatal Intensive Care where she spent the first week of her life: she was premature, had been delivered by me in our bathroom at home, she was missing an arm, and had a Code Blue episode in the first 24 hours in the hospital.

It was a few weeks later when these friends wrote their notes to Valerie. At that point it was too soon in her young life to know if the worst was over or if we were looking at a lifetime of uncertainty about her physical condition. But in the letters that our friends gave us, one thing was clear; although she was only a month old, she had already fought through some tough situations. And her strong spirit touched people.

We were very blessed that physically Valerie grew into a very healthy child who just happened to be missing an arm. And the letters that our friends wrote to Valerie were indeed prophetic. She continued to show her strong spirit in everything she tried, whether it was as an artist, student, or physical challenges like competing in rhythmic gymnastics.

Yes, it’s hard to let go and say goodbye. But I’m very proud of her. And I know that same determination that got her through the first few days of her life will help her with the challenges that lie ahead as she ventures out on her own.

A trip to Disneyland has been our default summer vacation for many years. Our familiarity with the Magic Kingdom takes away the stress that goes along with figuring out the drill in a new place. As soon as we’re through security, we’re off to get Fast Passes for Indiana Jones so we can squeeze as much fun as possible out of our two-day Park Hopper passes.

However this year, we decided we would make a trip to Southern California to help Valerie get a little more familiar with Chapman University in Orange but skip going to Disneyland. Chapman is so close to the Magic Kingdom that you can almost hear the screams from the Tower of Terror when you are on campus quad, so we figured we will have plenty of opportunities to do Disneyland over the next four years.

So if you’re not going to Disneyland, what do you do in Southern California – besides sit in stop-and-go traffic on the 405 Freeway?

I would highly recommend going to Exposition Park, a collection of museums and exhibits that sits on 160 acres on the west side of town. Who knew there was a chunk of land in LA that didn’t have cars on it?

It also is where the LA Memorial Coliseum, home to the USC Trojans is located. A fun fact: the Coliseum It is the only facility in the world to play host to two Olympiads (X and XXIII), two Super Bowls (I and VII) and one World Series (1959).

Although the west coast’s largest hands-on science center is in the park, our reason for heading to Exposition Park was to visit the Natural History Museum. Steve had fond memories of visiting the museum on elementary school field trips when he was growing up in the San Fernando Valley. And hard as it was for us to believe, our daughters said that after spending the previous day at an antique mall, an upscale mall and an outlet mall, that even they had had their fill of shopping. Looking at always-in-style dinosaur bones sounded pretty good to them.

Exposition Park has to be one of the best entertainment values anywhere. Tickets for the four of us was a total of $28.50 which paid for admission to both the Natural History Museum and the Air and Space Gallery at the Science Center.

The Natural History Museum opened in 1913 and is certainly reflective of a different age of museum design. Forget the interactive exhibits that are the norm of museums today; this museum was meant to be a place of reverence – very dark with lots of marble and wood. And definitely, a hands-off experience.

But the cavernous rooms with glassed-in dioramas of taxidermied California mammals are part of the reason for going. There is probably some of the same dust on the bobcat’s fur that was there when Steve saw the exhibit more than 50 years ago, but that’s part of its charm. It’s easy to forget how much smaller the world seems to us now than it did when these exhibits were originally installed.

However, recent additions to the museum and renovations keep the museum from seeming like it is frozen in time. The beautiful rotunda with its stained glass dome was just restored and reopened last year and they have added an “Age of Mammals” exhibit that has so much light flooding the gallery that it’s almost blinding after the dioramas.

I could go on describing lots more cool stuff we saw; I especially liked the space capsule that Ham, the chimpanzee, rode in for the Mercury space program and Steve liked the A-12 Blackbird that was on display.

Looking at a T-Rex skull will never be as thrilling as going on Space Mountain but the oldest exhibit in Los Angeles never gets old.

There’s nothing like a road trip for bringing the family together. And our trip to Southern California last week was one of the best we have ever had, perhaps because as the kids get older and start having their own lives, there aren’t as many opportunities for trips like this. With that perspective in mind, even the girls’ bickering in the back seat wasn’t as annoying as it is at home.

Our initial reason for taking the trip was to give our daughter, Valerie, an opportunity to get a little more acquainted with Chapman University in Orange. We were also hoping to see a dorm room so Valerie can begin figuring out how she is going to cram a roomful of stuff into the three square feet of space that she will be calling home for the next year.

Because the dorm rooms were being painted, we could only get into the dorm building and we weren’t able to see any rooms. However, at least now when Valerie goes through the sliding glass doors in Henley Hall, she knows that she should turn…as Beyonce says…to the left, to the left, with everything she owns in the box to the left…to find her room.

After the dorm, we continued making a loop around the nearly-empty campus, stopping in at the art department and then the business office to turn in some paperwork …all places that will soon be as familiar to Valerie as the C wing at Petaluma High was.

Our last stop was back at the administration building so Steve could buy a baseball cap and show off that he is a proud Chapman dad. On the way to the Chapman store, we passed a group of bored high school students and their anxious parents taking a campus tour. We overheard the staff member talking about the average SAT score of the students who are admitted.

Seeing these families, I couldn’t help but think how glad I am that it’s this year and not last year when Valerie still had the intense and stressful college application process ahead of her. We did a high-five with Valerie. “You made it into college!”

If we’re that happy about being Valerie being accepted, I can only image the sense of celebration that we will feel when our kids actually graduate from college. I think back flips will be in order.

I enjoy reading Veronica Blaustein’s blog. When our children were little, I certainly remember the challenge of finding some time alone. When you are in that season of life, not having a toddler follow you into the bathroom is a gift.

But I have been surprised as our kids grew up, how often one or more of them would be in the bathroom with us as we are brushing our teeth getting ready for bed. The vast quantities of “alone time” that I thought we would have once the kids could dress and drive themselves have never really materialized. The types of demands that our children place on us have certainly changed but I don’t think they have lessened.

That all said, I think we have done a good job making ourselves accessible to our kids. But what we haven’t done as good a job at is making “alone time” for Steve and me. And with two out of the three kids soon to be out of the house, it’s time for Steve and me to pick up where we left off before we had kids 22 years ago and get to know each other as people and not just parents.

So last Tuesday, Steve took the lead and suggested we go out for a date – nothing fancy, just a glass of wine at nice local restaurant.

I’m about as spontaneous as a lunar eclipse. I like things on the calendar long before they happen. When he made the suggestion to go out, it was about 8:00 and I had just gotten back from a meeting. I had on my “I only wear these to go to the grocery store” jeans and any trace of makeup that I had put on that morning was long gone.

Plus, I had planned to come home and enter a pile of vendor invoices and I was really looking forward to getting depressed staring at the bank balances in QuickBooks. How dare he want me to come out of myself and put my worry aside for an hour or so?

But I couldn’t argue with him when he pointed out that bars are dark so what I looked like really didn’t matter. And perhaps my perspective on the world would be improved by half a glass of pinot noir.

So I reluctantly gave in and we went to Tres Hombres in Theater Square. Steve was right about the lighting; it was sufficiently and flatteringly dark so I didn’t need to be concerned about what I looked like. Although we have probably only been there a couple of times before, we were welcomed by everyone who worked there as if we were regulars.

We were old enough to be the parents and maybe even the grandparents of the young people sitting at the bar but it felt really good to be out among people who were enjoying the atmosphere and each other’s company. None of them had the beaten down, “Life is so hard,” quality that I tend to project.

However, the best part of going out was that Steve and I talked but we didn’t talk about the kids. We talked like a couple who was really interested in getting to know one another. I heard Steve’s perspective on his life in a way that I had never heard before…after 26 years of marriage

We finished our shared glass of wine and headed home. That’s the kind of alone time I want more of.

We were chatting with some friends before church last week, when they asked us how our summer was going. My answer was that this is a summer of transitions for us.

In previous summers, one of the kids might be making the transition to junior high or high school, but I had a sense of security knowing that nothing in our lives would dramatically change in the time between June and August.

But this year, the dynamics in our house will be very different by the time we get to the end of the summer. Valerie will be away at college, adjusting to dorm life and we’ll be adjusting to life without her. Gulp.

Once Valerie goes away to college, two of the three kids will be out of the house – at least for the foreseeable future. So at the same time that we have been anticipating her leaving, we have also been planning another major transition: selling our house.

We are grateful that in spite of the toll the recession has taken on our business that we still have a house; many people don’t. But downsizing to a smaller place with less upkeep, less overhead and less debt hanging over our head sounds really good to us.

Since I started working full time outside the home, the maintenance and yard work hangs over my head. It would be great if I found it recreational, but gardening, and yard work in general, is number 11 on my top 10 list of favorite activities. I think about the change of seasons in the context of the amount of yard work that I’m going to have to do. In spring, rather than appreciating the emerging buds and leaves, what comes to mind is, “Oh darn, it’s spring, that means weekends of weed pulling.” I look forward to the dark, rainy days in January because there’s no yard work that I should be doing. Now my idea of a yard is two flower pots on a concrete slab.

So in our eagerness to be free of the burden of the house, we decided that we would put our house on the market by September 1. That certainly makes sense from a real estate point of view; we can take advantage of activity in the market before everyone’s attention turns from house-hunting to the celebrating the holidays.

But does it make sense for us as a family? Putting the house on the market one week after Valerie moves out and before we have had any time for us and her younger sister to adjust seems like we’re moving forward too fast. Perhaps what was really motivating us to get our house on the market so fast was that the sooner we were out of this house, the less we would have to walk past Valerie’s tidy, but empty room and be reminded of how much we miss her.

Selling a house that you’ve lived in for 15 years and the only house that Jennifer and Valerie have ever known is a pretty big deal. We can still move ahead with the preparations we need to take to get the house ready to put on the market. But we have come to realize that we will all be better off if we slow the process down a little and take one major transition at a time.

On Saturday, our daughter Valerie, celebrated her 18^th birthday. It makes no difference to Valerie that her July 17^th birthday means that she is a “Cancer” in the zodiac signs. What is far more meaningful to her is that she was born under the “Nordstrom Anniversary Sale” sign. Her birthday always falls during the two weeks of their sale so she can celebrate her birthday with a back-to-school shopping trip.

This year when we shopped at Nordstrom, we weren’t just buying clothes for school, we were buying clothes that Valerie would be taking with her when she goes away to college. And sending a child off to college right out of high school is a new experience for us.

Our older son moved away in stages: first moving into a house in town with some buddies while he was still at the JC and then finding and apartment close to his four-year school, San Francisco State. For the first year he was at SFSU, he often drove home to see a movie with Steve or rummage through the cupboards for chips and salsa. But now that he has deposited his car in our driveway in Petaluma so he doesn’t have to have the burden of a car in the city, we won’t be seeing him unless he invites us to come visit him. However, I still find some parental reassurance in knowing that he is only an hour away.

So when I think of Valerie going away to college in Southern California and not seeing her for weeks or even months at a time, it brings to mind the saddest movie that I’ve seen in a long time: “Toy Story 3.” Just thinking of the scene when Andy’s mom walks into his stripped and empty room and the reality of his leaving hits her, I get choked up.

For Andy’s mom, it seems like yesterday that he was playing with Woody and Buzz. For me, it’s hard to believe that 14 years have passed since Valerie was sitting at a Little Tikes table next to the window in her room, coloring precisely inside the lines in a Disney princess coloring book using markers that she had gotten in a McDonald’s Happy Meal.

The years have flown by, especially the last four in high school and now it is hard for me to believe that she’s 18 and going away. I know saying goodbye will be hard. I’ve talked to several mothers who said they cried the entire way home after they moved their child into the dorm and said goodbye.

But I also know that all of the zillions of mothers who have watched their daughters go away to college didn’t love them any less than I do, and somehow, both the parents and the kids made the adjustment just fine.

Steve and I believe that it will be better than “fine,” it’s going to be good for all of us. Valerie will get more resourceful and become more of her own person, her younger sister gets a chance to shine, and Steve and I can get back to being a couple first, and parents, second.

Right now, our family is going through a growth spurt…and that can be a little painful.

It was a dark and stormy night when our 17-year-old daughter, Valerie, got the “Award Letter” from the college that was her number one choice. That’s the letter that outlines how much the school is going to award in scholarships and financial aid.

In reality, it was actually a nice sunny day in April when the Award Letter arrived. It’s just that when an emotional teenage girl gets “dumped” by the college that has stolen her heart, the atmosphere in the house can take a pretty dark turn.

It took a few days, but the clouds cleared. Valerie knew that unless she wanted to graduate from college with student loans totaling well into six digits, that school was not in her future and she would need to come to terms with attending her second choice school. She would still have student debt but it would be more in the range of the cost of a nice SUV and not a jumbo mortgage.

From Steve’s and my perspective, we considered it answered prayer that the school that just “wasn’t that into her” (USC) made going to Chapman University an obvious decision; Chapman, her second choice, had come through with significant financial aid.

Plus, we felt that the smaller size of Chapman would be a better fit for her. I told her how it would have a more nurturing environment. In my attempt to bring her around to the positive aspects of going to Chapman, I’m sure I gave her the impression that because this school really wants her, they are going to smooth the path along the way as she goes through the process of loans, housing and registration. I gave her the expectation that she is special.

So this past week, when Valerie began the steps necessary to register for classes and ran into a couple of roadblocks she was stunned and angry. “Why does everything have to be so hard? I didn’t get any of the classes that I chose as options for my Freshman Foundation Course and all the classes look like they are full or wait-listed. Aren’t I going to a private school so I can get the classes I need so that I can graduate in four years?”

Once again, our daughter gets a cold dose of reality. You can do all the right things, work with wonderful people, and things may still not go as planned. That’s just life and none of us are exempt.

There is always a steep learning curve to figuring out any system. She needs to take some responsibility and be persistent. And it will probably mean that she needs to make some phone calls to crack the code of their online registration system.

After the first semester, she’ll know exactly what to do. It’s just for now, things would go a lot easier for her if she accepted that it is a process and she can’t expect to understand something that she has never had any experience with.

I am trying to teach her this lesson but I would be a great one for me to learn too. Take a deep breath, don’t panic and have a little faith. And be grateful when things do go as planned; it’s a gift.

Last week I had the opportunity to interview John Maher, aka Petaluma Pete. When I left after chatting with him for about an hour, the thought that popped into my mind was how much fun talking to him had been. (That’s the truth, even if there wasn’t a chance that Petaluma Pete would read this.)

So I thought I would share some thoughts and information about Petaluma Pete that I didn’t have room for in the article.

Interviewing Petaluma Pete was fun because John is such a positive guy. You would have to be a “I can take whatever comes my way” kind of person to be willing to be as out there as he is when he is playing as Petaluma Pete. While playing a piano in downtown Petaluma is certainly safer than playing in downtown Oakland, Petaluma Pete is still very exposed to all types of reactions, some nice and some not so nice but he takes it with a smile and keeps on playing.

I love that it was inspiration, partly from watching his son busk in the subway stations in Boston and partly from seeing Petaluma as a perfect fit for his favorite type of music, that led John to start playing in Petaluma. And because John is a performer at heart, when he wanted to see if he still had his piano playing skills, he brought his piano to the streets pretty much ensuring that he would always have an audience.

Being  Petaluma Pete is very physically demanding. Even though the piano is on a cart, pushing and pulling 600 pounds across Petaluma’s less than even streets and sidewalks is back-breaking work. And the honky-tonk music that Petaluma Pete plays isn’t meant to be played pianissimo. He is pounding the keyboard sometimes for four straight hours. Petaluma Pete wears gloves to protect his hands although he still has plenty of calluses to show for it.

It was interesting to learn that all the moving and playing on less than level surfaces takes its toll on the piano too. The first piano John purchased as Petaluma Pete didn’t last 90 days. John jokes that its replacement, a 100-year-old Palmer, can’t be killed. It’s made out of rock-hard Canadian maple. The hinges work loose so about once a month, John takes the piano apart and puts the pins back in. Also, he breaks a string about every week which a local piano tuner (who asks to remain nameless lest people think that Petaluma Pete’s upright is representative of his quality of work) has taught him how to replace.

What strikes me most about Petaluma Pete is how he is such a perfect fit for this town. He is the personification of Petaluma’s 19^th century heritage and he is such a natural addition to the downtown scene that it surprises me to remember that he has only been here less than three years…and not for generations.

John Maher has embraced Petaluma in a special way. Lucky for us, John and his wife hope to stay in here for the rest of their lives.

Last week, Steve and I experienced something that hasn’t happened to us in 22 years: six consecutive nights without any children in the house.

In the past couple of years since our oldest son moved out, it has happened once or twice that both of our daughters were invited to sleep-overs and were out of the house on the same night. But I hardly noticed that they were gone before it was time to pick them up the next morning.

However, for the last seven days, Valerie and Jennifer have been on a trip to Mexico with our church’s youth group. So Steve and I have had a small glimpse into a phase of our lives that seemed so far away for so many years, but is actually just around the corner for us – assuming Jennifer goes away to college four years from now and the other two don’t boomerang back home.

Since having the house all-to-ourselves – if you don’t count the cats – was a new experience for us, I wondered what it would feel like to come home from work and not have the girls at home. Would it seem empty and sterile without the energy…and piles of purses, shoes, and laundry…that our two teenage daughters add to the household?

The house certainly felt different; it was quieter, tidier and calmer.

While they were gone, it gave Steve and me the opportunity to spend more time together because our lives weren’t revolving around the girls’ schedule. I wasn’t distracted by whether Jennifer needed to be taken somewhere or what time she needed to be picked up. We could do whatever we wanted to whenever we wanted to.

And it wasn’t as if without the girls at home that we did anything crazy like running around the house naked…now there’s a scary thought…it’s just that while they were gone our relationship wasn’t taking a backseat to their agenda.

Plus, not having the girls at home certainly lightened the load of chores and grocery shopping. I loved coming home to the house just they way I had left it in the morning. There weren’t any new craft projects spread over the coffee table. There weren’t any shreds of Mini-Wheats crunching under my feet. I was done with the Saturday chores in half the time. And since Steve and I are okay living on an assortment of protein bars, I didn’t go to the grocery store once all week.

If I keep going with this line of thinking about how much work kids are, I might start wondering with why we ever decided to have them.

But we’ve got them and we’re grateful for them. It’s just that after a week without hearing the pitter-patter of teenage feet around the house, I found myself thinking that I could get used to this…and without that much difficulty.