<p>I just want to thank everybody on here who helped me with all the little details of moving in that I was wondering about. We had a great moving in day. Very well organized. Son even managed to get packed on time (albeit a little last minute for my taste). Son has a great room mate and a great room, and I left feeling very comfortable (but SAD!). Hard to believe it’s over.</p>
<p>Glad to hear it went well! We moved S in last weekend, and yeah, it’s hard to believe it’s done. I did have a dream about him last night wherein he unexpectedly showed up at home “just for the weekend.” When I asked him how he was getting back to college in time for his first class on Monday, he said he thought I could drop him off. I yelled “it’s a 14-hour round trip!” and then I woke up… phew. They are never far from our thoughts (or dreams) are they?</p>
<p>In the motel the night before my D moved in, I dreamed my D’s dorm room had a VERY large desk 
. When I told her, she said that she had dreamed that she didn’t have any desk in her room 
. She ended up with a nice normal size desk in a very spacious room :)</p>
<p>I was just sitting here in my office (it’s in the front of the house) when I heard a car door slam and, for a split second, I thought my son was home! Since he doesn’t even have a car with him that would have been a good trick. It was a neighbor of course. This is a little strange and will take some getting used to…</p>
<p>My son (home for the next week) was just watching a movie in another room and I guess a character was practicing the trombone in the show. For a minute, I thought it was my D playing her trumpet (isn’t your son a trumpet player, too, Weenie?)</p>
<p>Yes, son is a trumpet player. Not only will I miss the trumpet (although there was a time I didn’t think I’d ever say that!) but he whistles constantly too. Oh dear, now I am feeling bad again! :(</p>
<p>Well, I just heard from our S by email. This doesn’t really fit on this thread but I don’t know where else to put it. He’s been on campus six days. He entered a charity poker tournament the college put on. 500 kids entered. $15 to buy in. All proceeds go to AIDS foundation and one other charity on campus. Comcast ponied up some prizes for the top four players. Over two days, he came out first! He apparently won a 7-day trip to Cancun to stay at a four-star hotel. It expires a year from today and he plans to go in May after finals. He’s played poker casually with friends before, but I didn’t think he was any good. Probably a fluke, but now I’m worried he’s going to start gambling-- and with my money! Is there no end to things I will worry about with him? Even 600 miles away, I worry. Especially 600 miles away, apparently.</p>
<p>I think this gambling problem among kids has gotten really bad. The gambling on the internet is out of control. Virtually all of my son’s friends (and my son) have gambled on the internet. Several quit their summer jobs because they “were making so much money online.” I really don’t understand how it works, but to talk to them you’d think no one ever loses any money. Of course I know that CAN NOT be true - but they seem to believe they will always win. But once they have their own money and accounts it’s pretty hard to control. We don’t give my son his spending money, so all I can think is it’s his problem if he is still doing it and loses his money. Tough lesson though. Scary, huh?</p>
<p>I guess it doesn’t help that it’s become socially acceptable to be a gambler.</p>
<p>Momof 2inCA
Congrats! S could have gotten lucky, but now yu will worry that he’ll think so highly of his skills, he’ll continue to play. I suppose it got reinforced with the MIT kids in Las Vegas, and the recent Caltech boy on the television program. These kids were all winners.
How do we know when they win/lose? If charges appear on credit cards, does that mean a loss?</p>
<p>Funny how you are all hearing things that make you think your kids are back at home. It must be like losing a limb…you feel like it’s still attached (I’ve heard - I’ve never lost a limb). I guess I’ll understand after today.</p>
<p>Dreams: Last night I had a dream about my S. I went to visit him at school, but instead of being at Penn, he had opted to use the “Quaker Consortium” (this is a real thing) to take classes at other schools in the area - Swat, Haverford, Bryn Mawr and had actually moved into housing on Bryn Mawr’s campus (all female school) and had decided that he wanted to live at Bryn Mawr and take all of his classes there. </p>
<p>Weenie, your dream is hilarious! You must have been very relieved to wake up.</p>
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<p>Son is now a soph and we’ve decided not to give him spending $ either. We gave him some $ last year, and even tho he swore that he wasn’t using our money for poker, there was no way to know for sure. We’re hoping that, since he’s really cheap, he won’t be spending too much of his own money on poker. But you’re right, Weenie, it’s scary especially when they don’t realize how addictive gambling can be.</p>
<p>This was a university-sponsored event open only to students, staff and faculty, with all proceeds going to charity, and total cost was $15. The prizes for the top four players were donated by local businesses. It was the third-annual tournament and was part of a much larger Welcome Week series of events. The final round was apparently in the big exhibition hall. All of this is a way of saying (which was news to me) that I guess poker has become as socially acceptable as dancing. But with the rise in Internet gambling, it is worrisome (just like binge-drinking at college campuses is worrisome). And I wonder about encouraging underage kids (under 21) to gamble even if it is for charity and even if the most they can “lose” is the price of a paperback book. Could this one big win lead him to choose gambling as a “career” rather than public service, as he planned? Am I being old-fashioned or a worry wart (oh gosh, like my mother-in-law??) or is it just that I’m missing him?</p>
<p>H and I don’t gamble or even play cards. It’s just not our thing. On the other hand, I think for S, it’s the intellectual aspect of poker that he likes, rather than the chance for money or prizes. He loves games of strategy, from Risk to WarCraft. I think he would play for no money at all. I don’t know anything about poker, but isn’t it based more on strategy than pure luck (say as opposed to roulette or dice or something)? He does not have a credit card, and we have warned him not to ask us for more money if he runs out each month, so he will have to budget or get a job. He’s never run into an issue with overspending before, though he’s not a saver either. </p>
<p>The problem for me is that I still want to control what he spends his money on, just like I still long to make him eat healthier and exercise and study more… it’s just one more thing I’m supposed to let go of and have him make his way, right? I don’t want to be a controlling parent or a killjoy, but I do want to have influence still. I’m thinking that this parenting business has become MORE complicated with him leaving home, rather than less. :(</p>
<p>Funny, my grandfather played poker until all hours at his university–in 1918. My FIL used to play at the big poker tournaments in Vegas–as a hobby.</p>
<p>Still, I am thrilled that neither son has a gift for poker. The headmaster of their private high school in the US had to ban poker from the campus. I know one 19 year old boy who did not need a summer job. He made thousands from poker.</p>
<p>I’d rather send money.</p>
<p>I just hate the thought that my kid (or anybody really) would take money from someone without having worked for it. I guess that’s sort of the bottom line for me. I just don’t like gambling at all. Hate to be a prude, but I’ve never liked the idea of Las Vegas or any of these casinos. I was at Atlantic City once on business and it was just a line of blue-hairs throwing away their social security checks at the one armed bandits. All I could think of was that they looked like the same folks who would hurry down to vote down their school budget in a heartbeat! :)</p>
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<p>Living in CT with Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun casinos, this is exactly what we put up with. The senior centers sponsor trips to the casinos regularly, but these same seniors lament that they’re on a fixed income and can’t afford to pay their property taxes.<br>
As far as my son is concerned, I try to pay attention for what may be signs of problem gambling. I know he’s not spending alot of money on it since he has one of our credit cards and we’d know if he was using it to play on the internet. On the other hand, he likes both the skill involved in playing it and the relative ease with which you can make money(if you’re having a good night)…not necessarily the values we raised him to have. He also knows how we feel about gambling and that we won’t bail him out if he gets in a financial mess (he claims he’s too smart to let that happen).</p>
<p>Bill Gates was a notorious poker player during his time at Harvard. We even heard about him at MIT 
where it was advised that one not play against him. I think a certain kind of mind does indeed find poker and blackjack math quite straightforward. I know my son can do statistics in his head–although he’s way too fond of his money to gamble with it.</p>
<p>You can be a math whizz and still lose your shirt gambling. Vide Cardano, the author of Ars Magna and discoverer of the cubic equation.
<a href=“http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Cardan.html[/url]”>http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Cardan.html</a></p>