Wow!!! I can’t tell you how tickled I am to log onto CC after many years and see so many familiar screen names!! For new(ish) people, my kids graduated college in 2008 (Syracuse) and 2011 (Muhlenberg), so I am FAR removed from the college application process (although I do still refer parents with high school students to this site).
But today I had the wonderful opportunity to join a CC meetup and it rekindled my curiousity to see what the site is still like.
There’s been a few changes in my life… we left the Chicago area in 2018 and moved to Los Angeles for five years (1.5 years after COVID started so it became a difficult transition not being able to easily meet new people). But we did a ton of exploring in the regional Southwest/California coasts areas and became pretty good hikers! D2 and H were living in LA at the time so we saw them frequently. We knew they weren’t there for good, so when more life changes happened, we decided to head to New England. And a year and a half after we left LA, D2 and H relocated to Oakland, so we’re glad we left when we did.
Our grandson (D1 in the Boston area) was born in 2022 and we were spending so much time traveling back and forth between LA and Boston that we decided to speed up our move. We bought a house in the MetroWest area - hold on - FOUR doors down from D1! This was 100% her doing - she saw the house being prepared for listing, called us, and we actually bought the house without ever having walked through it (no, we did not have COVID brain fog!). We knew we were going to gut it (and make a small addition), so all we cared about was the condition of the foundation… we replaced pretty much everything. We closed in December 2022, listed our house in LA in April 2023, and moved east in July. We had a small detour right before the move when I was diagnosed with early stage breast cancer five weeks before we had to be out of our CA house. I had a lumpectomy, and three weeks later we were on the road, taking a week and a half to get to MA, making some stops for visiting friends and sightseeing. I completed radiation at Dana-Farber once we got here.
We had to live in an apartment for six months, waiting for our house to be done, putting most of our stuff in storage. But we LOVE our neighborhood and I love living in the Boston area. I’ve now lived in three of top four largest metropolitan areas in the country (raised in Houston), but none of them have the concentration of colleges and universities that Boston does (and in a much smaller footprint of city), and I love the young energy! The ocean is an easy drive, as are the mountains. Winters are not nearly as severe as they were when we lived in IL, and I really missed a true Fall when we were in CA.
As I scrolled through the list of threads in the Parent Cafe, I giggled that some of the same topics are still hopping - from Bag a Week Club, to Empty Nest, to Grandparenting. And some new ones that piqued my interest - Medicare (yup, on it now), Mah Jong, and Pickleball, which are now all totally relevant (although I have not tried Pickleball). Is the annual March Madness bracket still a thing?!?
Anyway, hello to all who I’ve known before, either through this website (or some of you I’ve met in person). It’s been fun going back and re-familiarizing myself with some of these threads! In the chaos of this world right now, it’s nice to know some things are still dependably there as you left them many years ago.
Oh, it warmly touches my heart that my avatar is of our Cavalier King Charles Spaniel. He’s 14 1/2 right now, and definitely on the struggle bus. But I love that I chose his picture so many years ago and he’s still with us - what a great traveler he’s been. He’s the reason that we didn’t ship both of our cars from LA to MA and fly - we had to transport him across the country in our car!
Although my avatar photo is newer, the original avatars are still alive (14 years old and boy they are raking up vet bills!). 
Welcome back !
. I saw your name and said “Chicago”!
Thanks for the updates! DS/wife are outside of Boston, and we like seeing them when visiting kin in Cape Code. We are still in Colorado, where happily we still have the other kiddo.