FROM OUR PRESIDENT – 2009-2010
Loretta Ehrlund, DVM
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I like to tell anyone I meet that Aggie Moms’ is the closest thing you’ll ever get to do again that will give you that same wonderful kinship of mothers and children that we all had way back when our kids were in elementary school, and we all gathered at the local elementary school a bit early so we could pass the time of day with each other, and share our concerns about the school, teachers and our kids.

Some of us are or will be feeling a little like empty nesters until that first semester tuition bill hits. I can’t imagine what that first tuition bill was for Mrs. Polly Krueger in 1926, but she must have had the same feelings of emptiness and wanting to see her son happy and well when she made that first trip to College Station, April 11, to visit with her son. The story tells us that she found the young man and his classmates homesick and missing those familiar things from home that only a mother can know. So she went home, called together other mothers of sons at AMC (what we were before TAMU), and organized a picnic weekend to bring a little “home” to the boys (remember TAMU used to be an all men’s college). And that was the first Parents’ Weekend!

Out of that was born the very first Aggie Moms’ Club, and now we, from San Antonio, are but one of 126 Aggie Moms’ Clubs! There is no other university with anything like it.

This next year, I want us all to reflect on this: Our purpose is to encourage all our students in their work, and if a few Care Bags and raising some scholarship funds will do that, then we will do that with gusto and generosity. Our purpose is to express solidarity in our students’ mental, moral and physical welfare, and if it’s sending Cheers cards, or encouraging some of our students to be on our AMEN (Aggie Moms’ Emergency Network) committee, then we will do that, too. But don’t forget to read between the lines of those purposes Mrs. Krueger set out for us: Our purpose is to support each other through bad grades and Brags, changing degree plans and late graduations. And our purpose is to get to know one another, to find help and strength for all of us through those difficult calls home, joys of kids finding their “soul mates” and some kind of understanding of just exactly what that degree plan means, and that these things too are part of growing our children into young productive adults. A job well done for each of us, and a job better done with good friends!