Happy New Year, everyone!! Spent last night with some friends who have twin HS seniors. It was nice to be able to share our story of the past year with them and their slightly stressed-out kids; hopefully our happy ending, with DS absolutely loving his (almost-safety) school, helped relieve a little stress. It’ll be fun to get together next year and see how their application adventure turned out.
Happy New Year!!! The year 2014 was a great year, first time D off on her own to college making it exciting yet emotional! Here is to another great year 2015!
We haven’t paid the spring tuition yet, will do it next week. When I was looking into the college costs, I noticed that the costs go up by 2-5% while the scholarship stays the same. I factored that in to the college cost for next three years.
One thing I love about D’s school is that they freeze tuition, room and board for 4 years for each incoming class. It makes budgeting easier.
D’s BF is coming tomorrow to visit for a few days. I met him briefly at Parents Weekend. I’m looking forward to getting to know him better.
We are hosting D’s boyfriend for 4 or 5 days. We had a really nice evening yesterday, saw Wild (we all liked it) and then the fireworks in Brooklyn, NYC where we live at midnight. She will go back on the train to his home in NJ (less than 2 hours from ours) in a few days and she’ll spend some time there. So far, so good, a pretty nice break. Tomorrow we go to IKEA and move some furniture around in the house–good to have an extra set of strong hands with skills to assemble furniture in our household of two!
Happy New Year everyone! I’ve been a bit under the weather but nevertheless managed to host our annual NEw Years Eve get together with our oldest friends. We’ve been doing this for 17 years now. We used to go out but then they had a baby in 1997 and couldn’t find a sitter that year so we had the festivities at our place. Steak, lobster, champagne, the works. Everyone gets dressed up, including the kids. We stay up until midnight to ring in the new year and then promptly go to bed, LOL.
Their daughter is where our guys were last year, but she seems to be calm and level headed about the whole process, including financial considerations.
DS did not join our party last night since he was spending the night (along with about 10 other friends) at a friend’s lake house a couple of hours away. He’s not been around much since after Christmas. Between guys night sleepover on Sunday, skiing at his best friend’s cottage in the mountains Monday and Tuesday, the lake house party last night, and a bowl game viewing party at yet another friend’s house I think I’ve seen him for 8 hours total since then! Honestly though, senior year was very much like this so this isn’t really a big change for us. When he is home he is fully engaged and we enjoy just sitting around chatting and enjoying each other.
He goes back on the 11th and his grandparents arrive on the 8th from the west coast to stay with his younger sister while DH and I are in Hawaii so he did promise to stay home for the few days of overlap with the grandparents, LOL.
Isn’t it nice to be on the other side of the application process?!? <:-P
@2014novamom Isn’t it great to host the NYE party? No need to worry about driving home. We hosted again for the neighborhood (we took over from a neighbor about 6 years ago) even though I wasn’t sure how much I wanted to do post-surgery. It has been three weeks and I’m still using it as an excuse to take it easy. Told everyone it would be especially low key. Invited people by FaceBook. Didn’t do much to plan, tried not to geek out about housecleaning. It was fun. Only one of S14’s friends came, but a few of S16’s did and brought their friends so there was a critical mass of Wii U players in the basement.
This morning S14 had his wisdom teeth removed. He’s NOT a happy camper. Hoping he cheers up and heals quickly. He’s doing a lot of reading-for-fun as he’s been starved for so long – maybe even years.
Dropped D at the airport this evening. That break went by very quickly! She did not relax as much as I expected (or probably as much as she needed), but she did get a lot of visiting in. Now I’m realizing all the things she didn’t do…spring break plans? summer plans? I guess we can discuss those over the phone.
I paid the second semester tuition online yesterday (ugh!) and I was stymied for a bit because I accidentally used my D’s login instead of my login. Then it hit me that one can only pay the tuition via the parent portal and not the student portal. The school doesn’t even pretend to think the students are paying their own tuition.
Until I used my D’s login I had forgotten I asked her for it. I saw that her grades will be posted on January 5. My H asked me if we should look and I said to just let her tell us about them.
Christmas break isn’t even over and we spent this evening finding and booking the spring break trip home. Break is the first week of March and surprisingly we found the best deal was a one-way Delta ticket home and Southwest back to school. I am finding that SW is not always the cheapest airline out there any more even with the free bags. It does pay to take the time to shop the one-way options in addition to the regular round trip flights.
AvonHSDad, I agree about shopping for flights. In the DC area, we have three major airports, but sometimes we look to Richmond or even Charlottesville for the better deals. In fact, my son is flying back today to school, and he is leaving from Charlottesville with a change in planes at Charlotte. We saved more than $600 going out of a different airport and a different airline. I am not sure what he will do regarding Spring Break. His dorm is closed (the rest of the dorms are not), so maybe he will be coming home – although he does have track practice.
Last night, he spent time watching movies with his older brother, who also returns to school today. We celebrated their birthdays with a nice dinner out and a cake. Both boys have birthdays this week. The younger son also applied for a few internships, although he does not expect to land anything, as he just started coursework in his major.
@AvonHSDad, United is $50 cheaper than Southwest coming home, and the timing looks good. Thanks for posting about that. However, I like the flexibility of canceling the ticket anytime with SouthWest because I am not sure if D wants to come home for spring break or stay there. Not sure about United cancellation policy, haven’t traveled with them in a long time. I will look up today, would like to hear what you all do with the cancellations.
Southwest’s cancellation policy makes it so much easier. I just booked DS’s spring break flight past weekend on Southwest with their sales price - even knowing there is a chance I will need to change it due to his class schedule.
@chrysanthMum - United, like the other majors, has a fairly restrictive cancellation process. You do have the right to cancel for a full reffund within 24 hours of purchase but I believe all of the airlines are required to offer that under the airline deregulation program passed by Congress a few years agos Otherwise, unless you are on an expensive flexible ticket, you face a change fee of $200 to change a UA ticket. With the fairly rigid school schedules we have not had to cancel although S-2011 has had a couple of change fee waivers due to weather that he has taken advantage of. I do agree that the SW change policy is most likely the most flexible and cheapest (with no change fee).
We are fortunate to be able to use United miles for DS’s trips back and forth to school, and thus face no change fees. The miles just go back to our account. And since Cleveland is not a hgh demand location for leisure trravel it is always easy to get flights. United works for us because we live less than 15 minutes from IAD which is one of their hubs, and we literally have a million miles we can use.
We have DS’s spring break flights booked already. He will first spend a long weekend in Madrid with DH who will be there for work and they will celebrate DH’s birthday together. Then DS will come home for the balance of break. DH will also see him in February for a father-son event at DS’s fraternity but I won’t see him until March.
We have not yet booked summer flights because those plans are still up in the air. He is certain he wants to spend the summer at home but might want to stay at school for an extra day or two to move his stuff into storage or into the fraternity.
Big change for high school students in Michigan announced today. Starting in 2016, they will take the SAT instead of the ACT as the state-sponsored college entrance test. I’m sure most will do fine with the SAT, but not too many have prepped for it.
@MImama – Wow! That is significant, especially given the fact that the SAT exam format will change effective with the March 2016 exam. I believe that part of CB’s motivation in changing the format was the fact that the ACT had overtaken the SAT in terms of # of test-takers, primarily b/c of the large # of students who take the ACT during the school day. Very intriguing. Thank you for posting.
Interesting indeed. I wonder if other school districts will follow suit.
Interesting change. Does “state-sponsored” mean that students are required to take that test to graduate? And does the state pay for it? Or does it mean that is the test that the state colleges require? In Mass, there are standardized tests to graduate but they don’t mean anything in terms of admissions (and only a small amount of merit aid for those with the top category of scores).
Ugh! I am not coping very well with D being so far away. Just dropped her off at the airport earlier today, the anxiety has started to kick in already.
D loves Wash U, it is a perfect fit for her. Classes were hard, finals were brutal. She slept most of the first week home. The rest of the time, between seeing friends and her grandparents, she was hardly home and I was fine without spending lots of time with her. It’s the distance that is killing me.
I should start hanging out at the HS Class of 16 thread but I don’t want to feel like a failure as a parent. S16 is only interesting in attending one of the UCs. H and I got scolded again by the college counselor, courtesy of H’s employer. “We are not aiming high enough” for the kids that what she said! The counselor was clearly disappointed that D turned down MIT and UChicago for Wash U. Anyway, the kids are happy that’s all we care about.