@Mom2aphysicsgeek So regarding ACT, Binghamton responded, “If you opt to take the ACT, we recommend you submit the essay-writing section.”
For me, recommend = require. So I’m still unsure as to whether or not he should do Writing in September. All this “over thinking” is going to drive me to drink! ~X(
Trips: We’ve taken some nice vacations but have always traveled with the kids.
DH goes on a lot of business trips. I suppose I’ll accompany him on some after the kids leave. We moved MIL here to town a few years ago, and she is pretty spry. But, she doesn’t feel she can drive at night or to places she doesn’t know, so I don’t know that I’d feel safe leaving DC21 with her for an extended period.
^^^^
Do the writing. They want it, but they won’t really consider it as a factor. Don’t worry about the score. It is what it is.
@STEM2017 I would rank the schools by likelihood of acceptance, affordability, and desire to attend, then I would add the info about essay and deadlines. I would go with whichever option covers the most top options. If a school will accept with essay from the Oct exam, I wouldn’t weigh that school in the decision for the Sept exam.
Fwiw, I would hate a school making English class placements based on the ACT essay. What a horrid evaluation tool! I would prefer a placement test at the school over that option.
ETA…all of that is bas d on the assumption that you might miss deadlines with the Sept essay. We aren’t using the ACT, so I haven’t looked at release dates.
@rightcoaster Not so worried about the score, worried about multiple week delays caused by grading the writing section. He has lots of Nov 1 deadlines and even a few potential mid-October deadlines.
Ah, he’ll be fine. We’ll figure it out.
@Mom2aphysicsgeek Good advice, thanks.
Agree about English placement. But I guess that’s what we should expect from SUNY.
@longwood - We passed within 30 minutes of Grinnell but did not visit. My daughter is a dancer and Grinnell has only meager dance offerings so it didn’t make her short list. In other respects, I think it would have been a potentially good fit.
And, yes, we have seen the Christmas concert. Our family is Scandinavian heritage on both sides.
Vacations without kids- my timehop today on Facebook is “Two days to lift off for Camp Winaka (girls) and Grand Cayman (DH and I). Off to buy mass quantities of sunscreen.”
So we did the Girl Scout camp/parent vacation thing too.
My husband travels A LOT for work and I don’t work full time, so ever since DD17 started driving I occasionally go with him on work trips. DD17 drives both girls to school and both are competent cooks and Grandma is only a mile away in emergencies. Plus our neighbors are to call at any sing of a party!
@mamaedefamilia wrote
This is one reason why S17 is on his way home today rather than touring a school with his grandmother. Turns out we need to visit again in early October. DS just happens to have a day off school, so we can tour while school is in session.
Just the two of us: We’ve taken three or four long anniversary weekends away when family has been in town and we’ve been able to somehow finesse the potential guilt trip minefield of not hanging out with everyone the whole time. (We also had overlapping couldn’t-get-out-of-them business trips one time where we had to farm the kids out to friends for a couple days, but we weren’t together for that.)
Not getting dark after sundown: Come to Anchorage (or anywhere similarly north but not above the Arctic Circle) for midsummer—you could totally still drive with your lights off (if it wasn’t illegal to do so), it just has the light level of a somewhat cloudy day between sundown and sunup.
Not Getting Dark After Sunset - H and I recently got back from Iceland. (A trip w/o kids!) The sun “set” at 11:30ish pm, “rose” at 3:00ish am, and only went from dusk to dawn, no dark. It was difficult for me to sleep and weird to not see stars for two weeks. Also some cities have so much light pollution that it doesn’t get “dark” in that you cannot really see the stars. Contrast that with some unpopulated areas in the west where it gets very dark and there are so many stars that it is difficult to pick out specific constellations.
Once we had overlapping business trips. DH stayed in Sausalito while I stayed at a downtown hotel in San Francisco, 10 miles away. Neither wanted to rent a car and commute. Mainly I felt bad for spending $500 per night for two rooms although we were not paying it ourselves.
@mtrosemom It gets ** very dark ** around here and in the mountains 
Lots of stars except on cloudy nights.
Trips without kids: Only a handful of overnight/weekend trips. My view is we will have the rest of our lives for those trips starting in about a year.
Senior year trip: My son (who is a roller coaster nut) went on a week long trip with 2 of his friends who are also coaster nuts last summer after graduation. I paid his portion. That trip started on the day that was selected for his graduation party. Because of so many other parties/events that summer, there was no other date for his party. Given the choice, he picked the trip over the party. Fine with me.
Last summer while at the Grand Canyon, my daughter (who loves horses) and I (because she couldn’t go alone and no one else would go) took the mule ride around the canyon rim. She wants to take the trip down to the canyon floor on mules (5 hours down) overnight stay (or possibly two nights) in a cabin on canyon floor and ride back up on mules (another 5 hours). I told her I would go with her (again because no one else in the family will). Likely would be summer after freshman year of college rather than next summer. We shall see if she keeps pushing for it.
@longwood We were in the Baltimore area last month and our friends were telling us how traffic cameras are sometimes hidden in fake port-o-potties (sp?) and other unexpected items positioned near roads! Crazy!
We paid for parking in a few places, including UCSB on a Sunday - which brings back a memory (forgive me if I’ve already shared on this thread). D15 had been accepted to UCSB and we were going to be in L.A. so we decided to drive up to Santa Barbara and check it out. I called Admissions to be sure we could do a self-guided tour because the only day we could make it was a Sunday. One of the student guides took the call, and said we could definitely do an informal tour on our own, but he would post our info on the guides Facebook page. Sure enough, a day later I got a text from a UCSB student who met us on his own time (again, this was on a Sunday morning!) and gave us a personal tour around campus. We were impressed (and I did give him a gift card to a local restaurant as a thank you). Paying a few dollars for parking wasn’t a deal breaker for me, but I think $60 would have put me over the edge.
@rightcoaster Congrats to your son on the college LAX connection. That’s great news and I hope it works out!
** Re: credit reports ** Just found out you can’t get credit reports for anyone under 18. Doesn’t affect DD’s situation. But means my advice to go check it for our teens is wrong. (Sorry about that. I guess I’m not checking S17’s.) Might be something to have him/her do as soon as they turn 18.
This seems really wrong, since it seems like there can be problems before a kid turns 18. Not sure what you are supposed to do if something pops up earlier.
I was advised to start by disputing the credit check agencies. So far it doesn’t seem like anyone has ruined DD’s credit. Just someone else seems to be using the same SS#.
$60 would be the perspective for viewing all other costs. (So would the suggested spending $$ amts.)
@curiositycat333 Google IRS and illegal immigrants using the social security numbers of citizens. Here is just one example:
http://www.wthr.com/article/secret-irs-policy-hides-identity-theft-victims
Parking: We paid at Stanford, UCSB, UCLA, USC, and UCSD. I believe Claremont McKenna was free IIRC. We got dropped off at Cal Poly so don’t know if that was free. I live near Berkeley and the parking over there is atrocious!
Re: paying $60 to park at Columbia. I drive a large SUV so there was probably a $20 surcharge that almost every NYC garage charges. I would ordinarily have taken the train & subway, but the Columbia stop was part of the college tour spring break 2016 itinerary so it made more sense to keep driving south instead of backtracking.
Having said that, the train and subway for two people traveling during the rush hour is $70. Still less than parking, gas & tolls, but the NYC area is just expensive on so many levels.