Major fast food chains are currently testing AI ordering at hundreds of their restaurants. Before long, a car full of girls can scream all they want to and it won’t bother anyone.
Your daughter will in time tell her kids about back when people actually talked to her to order food. Your grandkids won’t believe a word of it.
I trimmed S23 eyebrows before his senior picture and forgot to put the guard on the trimmer! I cut off a huge chunk of his eyebrow.
hahahahaha
Just last week, DH was 95% done with his self-haircut when I heard a “WHOOPS”.
He forgot that he had removed the guard when he went to trim off some fly-aways above his ear. Yup, an entire strip from front to back down to practically scalp.
For kicks/giggle: I made him cut the same strip on the other side = MOHAWK! just for pictures.
He just shaved it all off, cooler for the summer.
D24 is counting down the days until her last day at McDonald’s on 7/21. We have some relatives coming into town that weekend for a brief visit, so D24 is looking forward to some time off before school starts up again on 8/2.
There’s been some mild senior Class of 2024 drama. Apparently, 1 of the other students proposed on their group Discord chat to do a sunrise hike starting at an insane hour like 4:30 am on a weekday morning at the start of the school year. Last year’s seniors did this…and at the end of the year, they did a sunset hike. D24 tried to lobby for doing it in the evening or in the morning on a weekend since, as she put it, “some seniors have to drive their siblings to school.” The ring leader offered up all the parents as a solution to that. 
I told D24 that there’s a simple solution to this: don’t go. She agreed. 
Had another orthodontist appointment this week. D24 is very frustrated because orthodontist said it’ll probably be a couple more appointments before she gets her braces off. So senior photos will have her braces on.
Still waiting on CLEP exam vouchers from Modern States for Calculus and French. She’s going to finish up the US History II course this week.
Are you talking about the yearbook senior photos for the start of the year, or any private senior photos that might be sent in graduation announcements? If the former, I understand, but if the latter, couldn’t the photographer be rescheduled?
Yearbook senior photos. We’re not doing private senior photos.
The Child emerged from the bedroom to report that now, there are polls posted on Discord for people to vote on:
Ring Leader, when asked what if people don’t want to do it on a week day early in the morning, was observed posting something along the lines of “Well, then they’re all losers!”
The Child has also reported that she will not miss Ring Leader when they all graduate.
Stay tuned for the next episode of High School Senior Drama, now playing on Netflix.
Here the senior girls all do Senior Sunrise. They all meet up at the beach and watch the sun rise, then drive all over town honking their horns and waking the entire town up. S24 said the boys are discussing a senior prank by beating them to the beach and setting up BBQ’s and grilling so they have nowhere to park 
We have a senior sunrise gathering. You either go or you don’t 
. I think some traditions are great. Although in our state you can’t drive between 12:30 and 5:30 am until you are 18. So a drive to a mountain at that time would be a no go.
S24 is living his best life this summer. He still does not have a job although he’s applied to at least 10 places 
. At least he has started to work on his essay. He has his schools mostly picked out and he has a top 2 that he prefers. We’ll see how things pan out. Still focusing on summer, we have 6 weeks left…
Senior portrait proofs just came back.Seeing him in cap and gown 
definitely getting real now
That is so exciting! I love how there are different traditions, such as the cap and gown picture, we don’t do that in our area.
I am working on my spreadsheet and in a mere 6 months we should be getting notifications of college admissions 
. It’s getting real!
S24 and I visited St. Norbert today. It is a beautiful campus. He can “see himself there”. It’s the most expensive college he’s looking at. At my suggestion (this might be a doh!).
He will also visit state schools which are expected to be $10k/year less expensive, but SNC has a 4-year graduation guarantee.
He opted to skip out of the optional seminar on how to write a college essay. He said he learned all about this in AP Lang. I am not convinced that he knows how to write an amazing college essay. Of course he can write something… this kid will need scholarships to go to SNC. We will wait and see. But he is showing some interest, and that is positive. He likes a smaller school and wants to see UW Parkside again. Parkside will not be any kind of a reach for him. Also on the visit list are UW Eau Claire and UW La Crosse. He is undecided about major and I think liberal arts is somewhat appealing.
SNC is touted to have the 4th best college food in the nation. I think we have figured that it’s because they have a full-time sushi chef on campus during the school year.
How important is the essay? I figure he will get into all these schools without issue. I wonder if I should have forced him to go to the essay class, but… I am trying to be gentle with this kid.
How many essays will he need to write in total, including for scholarships?
My DS2022 is not a writer; the essays were the most painful part of the college process, and he had to write over 40 essays (ranging from 50 words to 5 pages).
But as he wrote more and more essays, they improved over time.
Comparing the essay quality of those written in June, vs those 6 months into the process, the latter ones were MUCH better.
Point is: have him write, write, and write some more.
DD2024 may choose to ED1 her #2 college, because it doesn’t have a supplemental essay or extra optional stuff that her #1 college has,
because she also is not a writer.
I’ve never guided a kid through this process before, but I’ve been watching a lot of this guy’s Youtube channel → https://www.youtube.com/@Collegeessayguy/videos
I took notes on a few of his videos and I’m making D24 do 1 of College Essay Guy’s essay writing exercises every couple of days. These are all intended in order to get one’s creative juices flowing. They all take about 5 min or less.
Before I put the list down below, just wanted something to mention that one of the hosts/podcasters on “Your College Bound Kid” mentioned in a recent episode…(paraphrasing here)…the essays (both the personal statement essay and any supplemental essays) are one of the only ways that the student has to truly speak with their own voice. Sure, your GPA, test scores (if you submit them) and activities tell a story, but there’s always more than meets the eye in a situation like this and the essays are the student’s opportunity to share something about themselves that you just can’t in GPA, test scores, and an extracurriculars list.
(writing exercise list in the next post)
Fun! Thank you.
I don’t know how many essays he will need to write. I was figuring he’d write one essay for the UW-System and one essay for private college.
I don’t know what scholarships he will apply for. There are a few local ones, Rotary, Lions, Chamber and some Scouts scholarships. But probably less than 10.
We are really in the thick of summer here. D24 just left on an incredible trip -4 weeks on the island of Chios with one of her best friends. Having her gone for a month (plus her older sister is studying abroad this summer) is a preview of the empty nest we will have after next year. I don’t like it!
We did not speak of college things in the weeks between school ending and her leaving - after the total grind of a year she just survived, I figured she needed a respite.
I’m hopeful something transformative and enlightening happens on this trip that she can channel into a killer common app essay when she returns next month 
We’re taking a whirlwind tour of a few schools in upstate New York toward the end of August and then hopefully she’ll have figured out her list of where she’s applying before school starts in September.
Hope she has an amazing time!
The trip sounds amazing and like just what she needs after a busy year.