@mamaedefamilia Did you get a chance to check out Grinnell on your tour schedule? It’s similar to Oberlin (minus the music school) and Mac, and known for good merit aid. Grinnell is even more isolated than St. Olaf, but probably has a more diverse and off-beat student body.
St. Olaf also has an annual Christmas concert which is nationally broadcast on public radio.
QOTD_n
Yes. Ideally once a year even if it’s just a long weekend. We feel, pretty strongly, that the family is only as strong as the couple and the couple needs its own dedicated time. It’s never at the exclusion of a family trip. We also feel it’s critical that kids realize not all revolves around them.
The kids call them “date trips”. It could be a weekend locally, a destination race long weekend, a cruise, an out of town wedding, but it’s pretty important to us. We have one right now, we will visit SD14 but also have alone time and did not bring the younger two.
Senior trip.
We will do a bigger family trip after graduation, I see it as my last chance to know I can drag a kid along! Who knows what the next summer will bring. We did something for each kid as they got close to grad, or right after and each has input into the trip.
Poll: Did your '17 child spend the summer
A. At a summer program offered at a local college ** no **
B. At a summer program offered at a college away from home ** no **
C. Traveling - mission trip, etc. ** just for a few college tours **
D. Summer school (local or online at home) ** drivers ed **
E. Working** yes at local marina 35 hours/week **
F. Hanging out with friends ** whenever he can **
G. Other (please specify)** community theater, ROTC scholarship applications, college essays
Trip without the kids. We take trips fairly regularly. Last year just for a long weekend. Two yeas ago we went to Vancouver for a “anniversary” trip. Occasionally I have accompanied DH on one of his many business trips to Europe. Nothing planned this year. I’m working for a start-up and quite busy. The past few years we scheduled in when S17 was already away and left D12 at home by herself.
Poll
A. At a summer program offered at a local college - No
B. At a summer program offered at a college away from home - Yes
C. Traveling - mission trip, etc. - Travel, yes; mission trip, no.
D. Summer school (local or online at home) - Yes: DE class both in Europe and at local college
E. Working - No
F. Hanging out with friends - Yes
G. Other (please specify) -
QOTD: This summer, DH and I took advantage of D17’s back-up plan and spent a month abroad whilst D17 is doing her program of choice.
Pulled into Columbus at 11:45 pm last night. I better not get a ticket at tOSU or they’re off the white board!
Impressions of Columbus so far: it gets really dark at night. Maybe I’ll have more after the event today.
I didn’t read everything, but it sounds like QOTE was about parent-only trip. We (also) ran up to Alaska last November and rented a car out of Anchorage and tooled around for about 5 days. Wanna go back.
Senior Trip: We’ll try to do a vaca but it will be last minute since I’m a little concerned about just how soon decisions will be made, her Kentucky trip, and orientation. Then, what if there’s a wait list? We always want to do SE US.
@muchquan Really? You went there with the wait list scenario? 
We are not ready to go there yet! 
I don’t think my son would express interest in staying on a wait list. I could be wrong but I think he will pick a school that accepts him and consider a wait list as out of contention. I guess we will see what happens next spring.
@paveyourpath haha! I’m with you on the wait list scenario. Just thought I’d remind everyone that next summer may not go the way you think. I lurked on the 2016 thread and there were serious decisions being made. Very stressful in many cases. I think our personal situation may be more simple. While I think we’ll be done by March, you never know! Bwahahaha! 8-X >-)
I know our decisions will be simple and not drag on. The joy of going through the big MAC drive through vs. making reservations to wine and dine is that you are in the express lane. Either they give you the discounted rate at the window, or they don’t. If they don’t, you just pull on through and drive away! ;). I am not sure that there are many schools who do a call back for extremely high merit $$.
Thankfully we’re not concerned about any wait lists. No reach schools at all for us. But we will be waiting until close to the very end because of competitive scholarships. So we may miss out on early bird specials for our big trip.
But good reminder!
Are there places where it doesn’t get dark at night? In my experience, when that big yellow ball in the sky dips below the horizon, it gets dark. 
@fun1234 regarding parking at Tulane. We have had no issues with finding parking on campus at Tulane in the instances where we had a car. However I agree with previous poster that for a visit to Tulane and a taste of NOLA and the French quarter, I would stay in the garden district and take the charming streetcar through the beautiful neighborhood to get to Tulane. It’s very scenic and also is likely the way your student would travel downtown (assuming he/she won’t have a car) should he end up there.
Same here M2
Well, sun also rises in Columbus. I think it’s somewhere there behind the fog. 66 degrees going to 84. Not too bad.
Screw waitlists. Viva la Safety!!!
trips we always travel with the kids, but we don’t travel much. My wife travels for work, my kids hate traveling, and we all find sightseeing sort of boring. So most of our trips have been ski trips. My kids hate the beach so that eliminates a lot of vacation ideas. I guess we are kind of weird. 
@Mom2aphysicsgeek Very well said. The merit money is either there or not!
I got a parking ticket and a speeding ticket (from one of those street cameras on Rt 1) in the same day at UMCP. :((
S17 still liked the school a lot, though, so it stayed on the list.
@dfbdfb wrote
There are so many different cultures and somewhat different socioeconomic strata at the girls’ school that it’s not a given. A lot of their asian friends will go to Korea, China, and especially India to spend time with relatives over the summer, but I don’t know if the kids look at that as a “gift”, lol.
We don’t plan to do it, although we do try and plan at least one family vacation somewhere together every year. At this point I think our graduation gift to D17 will be paying for college! Maybe a nice necklace or something, I feel like I can’t think that far ahead without getting really stressed out.
@CT1417 wrote
Holy schneikes! That’d be enough to knock Columbia off our list.
@curiositycat333 wow about the social security #! That’s terrible. I told H about it and we’ll check the girls’ credit scores this weekend. Thank you for the heads up!
Like CT1417, our credit has been frozen for about a decade after someone stole credit card paperwork from our house during a real estate showing. It is a total PITA to unfreeze it for anything, but we rarely do anything that requires a credit check, so it’s not a big deal and it’s worth the security. I wonder if we’ll have to unfreeze it when we do the FAFSA and CSS stuff?
@disshar that sucks about the guidance counselors. D asked her friend how she navigated the guidance counselors, and here they have the kids fill out this huge form and then they write the letters based on the forms. So cookie cutter, but better than a poke in the eye (I should add that one to the colloquialisms thread, ha).
@RightCoaster very cool about the LAX coach, and very cool about Chile. I had to do a huge PowerPoint presentation about Chile for my spanish class last semester, and now I really want to go see it. Patagonia, wine country, so much to see…
The last three years when the girls were in summer camp at the same time H and I would take a vacation together domestically-New Orleans for our 20th, Staycation for our 21st, and Key West for our 22nd. This year because of school we weren’t able to take a romantic getaway, and I’m bummed about it but there was no way around it. I’m also missing a girls’ trip to Santa Rosa beach for a wine festival in Nov because of all my classes, but they’ve promised me to do a “MOD Graduates!” trip again once I do.
Before the girls went to camp, we did not vacation without them except for our 15th wedding anniversary-the grandparents watched the girls (who IIRC were like, 10 and 8) and we went to WDW for the weekend. When we got back grandpa was literally sitting on the front porch with his stuff ready to go, and Grandma had already left. I don’t think they were used to such demanding kids-H says that when he was growing up it was “go sit in a room and watch tv and don’t bug the grownups”. The Ds wanted (and needed) a lot of attention, and the grandparents were wiped out at the end of it.
@mamaedefamilia wrote
This is how my D feels about WPI. She didn’t love the girl who was the guide, and felt like the campus “lacked energy”, and I showed her the threads about campus visit and guides on here, and she agreed to go visit it again when classes were in session if she was accepted. Some campuses really feel sleepy over the summer, that’s for sure.
I forgot to bring my earplugs to the Pitbull concert, and my ears are freakin’ trashed this morning :(. I’m usually super careful about my hearing-I even wear earplugs to zumba class (when I take it) because they play the music too loud. There were BABIES at that concert last night with no hearing protection on. I can’t even begin to tell you how mad I was at those sucky, selfish mothers. Shame on them. The concert went until about 11, and it was four hours of really loud music. Who does that to a baby? Grrr…
@MotherOfDragons My oldest ds is into very heavy metal rock. I don’t know any of the names of the groups he listens to b/c the music makes me cringe. He and my dil used to go to concerts together all of the time. But my dil refused to go to concerts when she was pregnant b/c she was worried about how the loud music would travel through the amniotic fluid and how it might impact the baby. I have no idea if it was a valid concern, but I love her for it! She is such a great mom!
@Mom2aphysicsgeek wrote
and @itsgettingreal17 wrote
And D is adding the wrinkle of applying for fully-funded study abroad programs that announce finalists in March and April. At least she’ll know most/all college results way before them! She could have a very difficult decision to make if, for some reason, a scholarship cannot be deferred a year like admissions can.
(D would like to take a gap year before starting college. She’s graduating a year ahead of her birth year cohort.)
@whereismykindle Have you confirmed gap yr admissions at the schools she is applying to? I can’t remember which schools, but I remember specifically noticing a couple that did not allow gap yrs. I was surprised but moved on bc it wasn’t an issue for us.