The droids can’t come home until Wednesday morning, boohiss!
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I was relieved that D24 managed through airport security & didn’t lose her ID like she did that one time coming back home from the HS trip to France. 
I was pretty anxious about it, to be honest, on Saturday morning this past weekend.
D24 has talked about some interesting things since she got home. Apparently, the upstairs neighbor in the dorm likes to move furniture late at night on Sunday nights & it keeps D24 & her roommate up thinking, “Why are you rearranging your room NOW?” 
D24 said she loves the cloud-shaped magnetic key-ring holder thingy we got for her…it gets a lot of use. And the travel metal cutlery set (fork, knife, spoon, chopsticks in a zip up pouch) gets used several times a week. So does the microwave ramen cooker.
She said that she likes eating in bed, so she often gets her dining hall food in a to-go box and then walks the <5 min to her room to eat in bed.
Kid said she likes being able to pick her own classes, loves all of the small class sizes at her school, but was slightly annoyed that the on-campus Starbucks has been out of strawberry syrup for the past 2 weeks. 
She doesn’t talk about boys, but she’d already told us previously that she’s not going to tell us about her love life until somebody reaches Official Boyfriend Status and we are not allowed to ask in the meantime. However, she has had some pretty funny commentary about the freshmen boys.
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S24 got home Friday, but D24 is not coming home because of her class schedule and difficult travel logistics. Originally, she had plans to go to Boston with a high school friend, but now it looks like that is falling through and I feel terribly that she may be stuck on campus by herself. I am far more distressed about this than she is, and she says she is excited to just have some quiet down time.
S24 seems to be doing really well, but definitely is more into the party scene than I would prefer. He says his grades are good (he has to show final grades to me if he wants to take his car next semester) and he is very happy. He got all the classes he wanted for Spring and he seems to particularly like accounting. We just signed a lease for an off campus apartment next year, and I am excited that it is a brand new student apartment complex that is only two blocks from the business school. He and his current roommate are going to share an apartment, and several of his other friends will be in the same building. For Christmas, he will be getting very exciting things like small appliances and dishes 
Since he got home, he has been sleeping a lot, hanging out with us some, loving being with the dog, and also spending a lot of time catching up with his hometown friends. He actually had a group of about 8 guys come over to watch the Gamecocks game at our house on Saturday and it was fun to see all of them, too.
D24 is really settling in well at Smith, is doing well in her classes, and is very intellectually engaged, which is great. So far, she loves the Pioneer Valley, but has asked for a lot of winter clothes for Christmas. She and her roommate have become very close, and she is making more and more friends. Next semester, she plans to take advantage of the 5 college consortium and take a class at Mount Holyoke that she is excited about!
All in all, things seem good and, almost a full semester in, I think they both are very happy with their choices, so that makes me very happy.
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We’ve got friends in the band and on the dance team and they are so excited for the parade!! We’ll definitely be watching!
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It’s nice to read how everyone is settling in. S24 came home today. We had a nice family dinner tonight and now he’s off to catch up with some friends. He loves school and is doing well. He has decided he is going to try to do a double major and also wants to go abroad which he previously was not interested in. It’s amazing to see the changes in just a few short months. This weekend he will work a few shifts from his summer job. We’ll wrap it up by driving him back to school on Sunday. Happy Thanksgiving to all.
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It’s so nice to read about everyone’s Thanksgiving visits! One arrived home early (Saturday) and one comes home tonight. Can’t wait! There’s been a LOT of sleeping and eating so far (from the kid who has been enjoying perhaps a tad too much college fun IMO–should one be skiing off of rooftops as an “activity?!,” but nobody can say this kid is not having a blast at school…he SAYS his grades are still excellent and we shall see…). The one on his way home tonight is insisting we go see Wicked ASAP. I’ll have to remind him that I have a huge meal to cook!! But I’m sure I’ll be at the theater too… Can’t wait to hear all the stories. I have to remind myself to keep my “that’s so fascinating face” on instead of my " 
and did you not remember that I bought you like 5 containers of Clorox wipes!?" face.
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One thing that’s an adjustment which DH & I are both learning how to do is shifting from being directive with our kid (“you need to go do X, Y, and Z”) vs. not (“Have you considered X, Y, or Z?”). This is something I’m sensitive to since 1 of my parents was extremely directive and pushy, would act like their way was the only right way to do things, and because of that it drove our relationship south when I was an adult. My DH sometimes can have a tendency to be pushy & very assertive on his favorite topics…
…topics like summer jobs.
And yeah, it’s not even December yet, but he brought it up on Saturday on the way home from picking D24 up from the airport for Thanksgiving break. Sweet baby Jesus, help me.
However, we were able to take the pedal off the metal and calm Dad down. And D24 & I later had a open conversation about the topic. She’d mentioned that her ‘back up plan is to earn some $$ by doing Door Dash.’
Inside my head, my mom brain is going “NO!!!” DH basically said out loud what I was thinking. Fast forward to a couple of days later and when D24 & I talked about it, she was a lot more open to hearing a message from Mom of “Hey, you mentioned using Door Dash as a backup plan. As a female, you might want to consider how working a job like that might affect your personal safety, if you had to do deliveries to not-so-nice parts of town.” And that’s when I learned that she really wasn’t serious about Door Dash. Whew.
So I encouraged her in Jan or Feb to make an appointment & meet w/1 of the pre-health advisors on campus, talk to them about her career goals & how getting into PA school will require direct healthcare experience hours, and do they have any advice or recommendations on how to get started with that.
We ended up then talking briefly about some of the obvious choices, how to figure how which type of positions needed certification training & tests and all that, which ones she could complete in the shortest amount of time. She, at least for now, thinks that getting EMT-Basic certified early next summer in a 2-week bootcamp-style of EMT class would be a good idea and then she could work locally as an EMT the rest of the summer part or full time. We aren’t planning on doing a family vacation next summer anyway, so this would definitely be do-able.
I also suggested to D24 that she take a copy of her resume to the career center on campus and get their input on how to reformat her resume given the sort of thing(s) she wants to do.
On the plus side of all this, I didn’t get as much eye rolling as we got on Saturday. LOL.
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It has been so wonderful having D24 home, the house feels complete and while there’s a little bit of friction adjusting, it’s great having her home. I used ChatGPT to help come up with words to describe it. Here’s to heimkehrwärme for you and yours!
Prompt: I’d like your help coming up with a German word (or a German sounding word) and definition that describes the warmth and completeness that a family experiences when their kids return from college
Certainly! Here’s a German-inspired word and its definition:
“Heimkehrwärme” (heim-kehr-vair-muh)
Definition: The profound warmth, joy, and sense of completeness a family feels when their children return home from college, filling the house with renewed life and love, as if the heart of the home has been restored.
This combines:
• Heimkehr (homecoming, return home)
• Wärme (warmth, coziness)
It evokes the deep emotional connection of family reunion, drawing on the sentimental and expressive nature of the German language.
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I love the sentiment, and heimkerwarme does sound like it could be a real german word!
S24 has definitely triggered some heimkehrwärme for us as well. He seems happy, healthy, confident about the close of the term, but also appreciative of being home, back in his own bed, plans to see old friends–all good.
I will say some of the stories he told us were a bit more . . . colorful . . . than anything I would have shared with my parents back in the day. I am going to choose to see that as a sign we are trusted parents, and not criminally lax parents.
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We’re taking the colorful stories as parenting wins, but they have definitely sparked some “could you imagine if we would have told our parents that…” conversations.
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Hump Day of The Turkey Holiday: I had to use a phrase I’ve never used before to D24: “Life is frustrating!” This was in reference to the bureaucratic red tape and an unrelated minor friend tussle she was freaking out about—but it gave me a large window into a lot of past trouble in her life (because of traits seemingly shared by a large number of people her age). I gave her the obnoxious but valuable parental wisdom that if she is in a friend group of 3, she should expect to get her way approximately 1/3 of the time. This is life math that everyone in my friend circle practiced by habit once we were in college—but I think Covid might have slowed down this social recognition a little bit for her cohort. Hopefully, she’ll be helped by my blinding revelation.
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D24 went to the movies today w/1 of her BFFs, who is attending ASU & living at home (we are in the PHX area). Learned that BFF entered with about 40 credits from AP exams. Woo! So she entered as a sophomore and will graduate early. BFF is having a hard time making friends…most of her classes are not first year students. BFF has joined the mock trial team and they have a big mock trial boot camp for a week over winter break. D24 said that she’s grateful that she gets to live on campus at her school.
A lot of the kids from our HS who go to ASU tend to only hang out with their former classmates from HS and that’s what D24’s BFF has sort of fallen into.
D24 also learned from BFF that 1 of their HS classmates got deported, as did the kid’s under-18 younger brother, even though the parents have green cards. Pretty awful situation for that family! BFF said that the deported classmate’s parents have been trying for 11 yr to get green cards for their kids.
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Thanksgiving has seemed extra special this year, and just wanted to say I am particularly grateful for this supportive, kind, wise online community where we can celebrate our kids successes and gain advice when there are troubles. I truly value you all. Hoping those of you who have your kids home a wonderful weekend and sending extra hugs to the many of us whose kids couldn’t make it home quite yet. 
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Dropped D24 off at the airport at 4:30 am for her 6:30 am flight back to TX. But there’s now only 2 wk left of the semester so she’ll be back on 12/13! It was nice having her back. She’s grown up a lot since August. 
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Mine goes tomorrow and comes back in 7 days. Ubers. Air. Highway robbery
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I hear ya on the highway robbery!
I see a lot of Southwest Airlines suggestions here. My S24 for this thanksgiving break used another midwest budget airline and was sorely disappointed. Is Southwest Airlines pretty reliable?
Sw carries more domestic passengers than any airline in America. It’s not spirit of frontier or Allegiant or avelo or breeze.
Any airline can have issues - but it’s my favorite. It’s also dominant in many airports.
Some of the small budget fly every few days. Sweet flies many times in one day.
But I’ve been on sweets, AA, Delta, United abd had issues. That can happen to anyone.
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Southwest has the only direct flights between S24’s college and us, and in fact we just dropped him off for the flight back.
I don’t personally love how Southwest does seating, and we would rather get miles on other airlines all else equal. But generally speaking we have no complaints about reliability, and since it is the only direct flight, I think we are all going to be flying them quite a bit over the next few years.
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