<p>Thanks my virtual support group and friends! 
You all can send wedding ideas and suggestions my way any time you want! Will be looking to all of you when I need to vent! Thanks!</p>
<p>arabrab – so true!</p>
<p>oregon101 – you’re hired. Can that bus make its way here with those who like to do party planning?!</p>
<p>NM – congrats to your family! </p>
<p>I’m hoping whenever D gets married the whole thing stays tastefully low-key and, hopefully, stress-free. More importantly, as of now, I hope that wedding planning is several years down the road! :)</p>
<p>We have been telling D since she was little that eloping is totally cool. However, she has been planning her future wedding for years and years…
H and I went to New Zealand to get married. We were 33 and 32 and living in a very small and ugly town. There literally was no where decent to house guests. Add to that the fact that my family invented the word dysfunctional and there you have it. H had a close family friend who was on an exchange ministry. We were suppose to have 5 at our wedding (mother-in-law let us know she had a ticket without asking–the minister and wife were close friends). Well, best laid plans. We had 100 church members at our wedding, were on the front page of the Dunedin newspaper twice…etx. They served lamb at our wedding dinner (I am a veggie) and so much more. Not all good, not all bad. Well, we are still married after 28 years. The worst and funniest part of the story is that I could not tell my mother that my mother in law was there. My Mom is SO competative. Managed for 8 years and then it slipped out one day.
I think I am just writing this for my own entertainment!
But, that said, Can I decorate the bus and make up the menu?
We are having a Kentucky Derby Party this Saturday but my house sure does not look like it . Love the Dollar store for hat decorations. Hey, how about a dollar store wedding–think I will e-mail this idea to headquarters…</p>
<p>Congragts NM. Yet another busy time for you!</p>
<p>oregon, I like your wedding story. Very adventuresome.</p>
<p>This morning, we were gathering report cards back to 8th grade for S1 because he needs evidence of schooling for nine years for his work visa (among other things). We don’t have a final transcript sitting around for him (although we have it for S2) and his high school wouldn’t be able to turn that around in any sort of timely manner. However, I will order one today for the future. I remember reading on some thread or other that employers never look at a transcript. Both of S1’s job prospects required him to submit his college transcript before an offer was made, so obviously that piece of wisdom falls into an it depends category.</p>
<p>S2 discovered a thrift shop where you can buy anything you can fit into a bag for $3 so has started buying bags of clothes. I think he will be one of those future H’s who hoards trash.</p>
<p>That’s great information to have, Analyst. H has been after me to weed out the kids’ files and now I can definitely prove we may need information from them in the future. </p>
<p>I had to laugh about AnalystS2. SabarayS is a fan of thrift stores as well as evidenced by all the stuff he brought home with him. So much stuff. It must be a guy thing because D is nothing like this.</p>
<p>Fellow hoarders: Here’s a tip I got from a young, hip mom I know. She takes a digital photo of all of her kid’s artwork and important papers when they come home from kindergarten or 2nd grade. Then periodically she sends them off to one of those picture book companies along with current photos and has a book made for each. </p>
<p>I know I could never go back through 19 years of boxes, drawers and binders to make scrapbooks, but I might be able to pull this off with some of the crumbling elementary school masterpieces.</p>
<p>sabaray, the other thing I harp on is for them to keep a file with every single address they have ever had, including the 6 week family stay in Peru or the dorm number for freshman year, etc. If they ever need to get a security clearance, those guys demand a physical address accounting for every minute of your life going back ten years. (If you lived in a rural area with no address, you need to have directions to the location.) If S1 is going to be bouncing from country to country, he will have to be very diligent about writing stuff down. </p>
<p>I expect him to accept ownership of all of his records effective upon graduation, so getting medical, educational, financial, and all other files in electronic format and sent to him is our big task right now. He obviously can’t lug paper copies of anything around with him. For some reason, launching for first job/real adult life feels like a much more monumental task than launching for college.</p>
<p>All this makes me sad for kids who grow up in foster care, or have very dysfunctional parents who don’t save stuff. I guess a school record can be recreated by contacting each school, but it makes it difficult. Are people who grew up in foster care just never able to get a security clearance if they can’t recreate every place they stayed? My sister lost every bit of paper (and all pictures!) from her kids’ childhoods when she didn’t pay the bill at a storage facility.</p>
<p>Congratulations to NM on your daughter’s engagement!</p>
<p>It’s a mundane detail but I love that the '13 parents come from so many interesting places around the country. Minnesota, Texas, Oregon, etc. I’m hoping D2 wants to venture out of the northeast for college. Maybe I should go back to school just to experience a different region of the country …</p>
<p>More great tips. Those are definitely the kinds of things I would not think of. So much of what D’s doing now is moving into the areas I know nothing about and frankly don’t want to learn about. Hopefully that will help me cure my urge to micromanage!</p>
<p>Missy - re younger D’s wedding. I cannot even think about how that planning will go or if there’s even be planning! However, my olderD and I were not always on the same page and now… if and when she gets married I already know she and I would be on the same page for the most part. When I think about younger D… I think she is either going to be right up there with a bridezilla or more likely, she’ll be completely independent and follow a similar path as Oregon. Writing the check might be the perfect idea… but yes, I would be there. She adores her dad so she give at least him a heads up.</p>
<p>Seems to me that kids in MN like MN for school. My kids were very big on experiencing a different part of the country for school, but even yesterday I heard of a couple kids transferring back to the schools around here (St. Olaf, Carlton, Gustavus) from small LAC’s out east. Not sure why that is, but it helps that there are some really great schools locally.</p>
<p>New wrinkle in getting son home… .there is some chatter about his going with some “friends” to Martha’s Vineyard for a few days post finals. Seriously? He makes making a plan nearly impossible!</p>
<p>missypie, it depends on the person’s skill set and the level of clearance on how much extra effort they will go through and where the lines get drawn. Addresses are just one small issue of course. I’m aware of one man who was denied a clearance because of something his wife had done well before they were married. The government thought it might create a blackmail risk. They didn’t know if the person applying for the clearance knew about the event and they weren’t going to tell him out of privacy considerations for the wife, so this young man with a spotless record was denied with no feedback able to be given to him on why. Clearances are a major pain in the neck, but my father needed one, I needed one, my brother needed one, and so forth, so I guess I just have that as one of my little check list items. A lot of engineering companies do defense work so I think that need is more likely to pop up than not. The paperwork to work in finance isn’t much easier. They need exact start dates and end dates of employment for every job. Month and year don’t cut it and I have spent some phone time calling former employers tracking that stuff down before I learned to keep better records.</p>
<p>Moda, you could always fire yourself as transportation coordinator and try one of those “We’ll see you when you get here. Just book a flight and pay for storage out of your own account ;)” moves and see what happens. Could be interesting.</p>
<p>McSon is fortunately (or unfortunately) close enough to collect, and I am heading out to do same right now. Will miss the whole “walking around the house naked whenever I want” part of the empty nest, but it will be nice to have him for a spell before he heads north for a month.</p>
<p>Cheers,
K</p>
<p>Kmc, you make me laugh so much! Sounds like many of us are enjoying the same perks as empty nesters.</p>
<p>Wow – as someone who worked in hi tech and who has a spouse that still does, I have absolutely no idea how we’d ever get back to official end dates at companies that are no longer in business. The start date I think we’d have for most from the offer letter, but even there it might not be fully accurate – I think at least one was delayed while we took a vacation.</p>
<p>I have been interviewed for security clearances for other people over the last 30 years, and I would say that the people doing the clearance interviews still have no sense of humor and seem to have come right out of a 1959 cold war book.</p>
<p>Modadunn, Martha’s Vineyard for a few days in May sounds quite wonderful - before the madding crowds descend. I have fond memories of college trips to various islands off Cape Cod. Your son could fly MV>Boston>home … though there is still the matter of all that dorm stuff.</p>
<p>Hard to get worked up about college road trips until they really happen…seems like in many cases, one set of parents says no, or one kid has no money, and pretty soon what sounded like a great idea one Saturday night falls apart.</p>
<p>So, are we doing another bus trip? Wedding/Dollar Store trip? I’m in.</p>