I have received a lot of phone calls from my daughter who is a senior at Niagara University in the four years she has been there. 

There was the distraught call her first week at school that I missed and was on the answering machine when I got home from an outing with her younger brothers.  She was in tears as she had not gotten up in time to get the package sent from home.  It was a long weekend.  She was homesick.  She was at school and wanted to be at home.

There was the call later that same semester about how cool it was to meet Ben Folds as a member of NUSGA – the student government.  She has gone on to be a class senator and class vice-president in the four years and a very active member of the Campus Programming Board.

There was the happy call at the end of freshman year to tell me she got the Resident Assistant position for her sophomore year.  There was the not so happy call about her RA placement for junior year.

Then, there was the call today.  She isn’t on campus during the day this semester as she is student teaching.  It was lunch time for her kindergarten class.  Why did she call?  She wanted me to go to the Niagara web site and tell her about this morning’s press conference announcing a $10 million dollar gift to the university.  B Thomas Golisano has gifted the university with monies for a new science building.

Why do I find today’s phone call worthy of a blog post?  As parents, we often wonder if we have done all we can to help raise responsible adults.  We often wonder if we should influence their decisions or intervene when these decisions don’t look at first like they are going to work out.  Today’s phone call, on top of alerting me to good news about the university family that we have come to call a part of our own extended family, helped me know that the college years of my daughter’s life have been a success.  She is interested in things other than herself.  She loves where she is and will, undoubtedly, give back to the university that has given her so much over these past few years at some point in the future.  She has learned to work out those things in life that are not going the way she wishes and to not depend on Mom to help from afar (with the exception of calling for me to read her the press release).