<p>FlMathMom - happy birthday! Hope your son does give you the best gift possible this year - his decision!</p>
<p>madbean - we are right with you on the rocky seas - hey, hold onto the handrails now!</p>
<p>HighHead - congratulations on Yale! kathiep - congratulations on Champlain. We almost stopped off there when we visited UVM - gorgeous area.</p>
<p>Wow, what a lot of debarquees today!!! Congrats all around. What an exciting year our students have ahead of them. Good luck to them all!!!</p>
<p>Yay, fogfog! Congratulations to you, too! See you on the river…</p>
<p>Congratulations to all abandoning ship!</p>
<p>madbean, here’s hoping you leave the rocky shoals for the peaceful Bay of Great FinAid.</p>
<p>fogfog and highhead…yay to Yale! </p>
<p>FlMathMom- happy birthday!!!</p>
<p>Rice
Son wrote me an amazing birthday poem describing our journey of the past two years. He ended it with…
So now is the time
to pick my big winner,
But it is really just because
I want to have dinner.</p>
<p>So with all the knowledge we’ve gained,
It’s time to write the check
Because the school of my choice
Is none other than Rice.</p>
<p>He has the biggest smile on his face. He is genuinely happy and excited. I won’t say Olin is a distant dream, but he has finally moved on. DH and I would have been happy with either Rice or GA Tech. Son did not want to discuss his thought process at length, but he did say that his decision was not based on academics. One of the reasons he loves Olin is b/c of the family atmosphere. He felt that Rice’s residential college system would be more family-like than Tech. This feeling was reinforced by many posts on CC.</p>
<p>Thank you all for sharing this part of the journey. I am looking forward to the next part…well, not the paying part of it.</p>
<p>Congrats to all the decisions. UT we may be joining you soon! ;)</p>
<p>FLMATHMOM–Whoo-hoo Rice! Congrats. I tried to get DS to apply there (probably because I thought I’d love the school! 
And remember the discussions of kids not cleaning–if I remember correctly Rice cleans all the bathrooms!!! That in itself is a reason to choose it! Seriously, congrats! And Happy Birthday!</p>
<p>FLMATHMOM: Best birthday gift I can think of!! Congrats! Happy Birthday!</p>
<p>Congrats back to everyone and thanks, too. This group is so fun to share with. I love the idea of your son and his poem, FL - that sure goes in the “keep forever” box! </p>
<p>So now we all just need our financial aid in order and we’ll be good for summer - especially since spring has gone missing (loved that!)</p>
<p>
I have every one he has ever written. Best gift a person can receive. He wrote some of his essays about his birthday poems.</p>
<p>FlMathMom…so excited and happy for you and DS!!! What a wonderful son you have!</p>
<p>So I just had a truly wonderful couple hours with my daughter discussing college life etc. We then spent a bit of time going on Juniata’s website and looking at the fall course selections. It is so very wonderful to see her so happy and excited about her choice. She was so blase during the whole search that I was worried that it would carry over to her attitude towards college. It certainly hasn’t!!! I am so happy and excited for her!
We started to discuss how much/little communication she wants/expects from us. I told her that I would really leave that up to her (unless it was super important on our part). I told her that other than skyping once a week, everything else would be gravy. I guess those years of no contact with her when she was at summer camp will come in useful for us! Of course, even though I am of the generation of the once weekly calls home (collect) to the family, she is of the instant/constant communication generation. So actually I believe that she will contact us much more than she anticipates! When she was a camper she never wrote to us. Once she was on staff at summer camp and had access to a phone, she texted me almost daily. So…I am expecting at least infrequent texts!</p>
<p>To our captain–for some reason with “Avon” in your name I thought you were in CT. I am hungry for good reviews of Miami. We’re in VA, visited M of O twice, but I still feel like I don’t know a whole lot about the school. DS’s college counselor and I were both gently pushing for a smaller school–he is a very shy kid. Direct admit to Farmer, though, so maybe that will shrink his world a little.</p>
<p>**<em>♪♫</em>Happy Birthday to Flmathmom<em>♪♫</em> **</p>
<p>Highhead~Congrats on Yale. </p>
<p>Kathiep~Congrats on Champlain</p>
<p>Flmathmom~Congrats on Rice, and what a great idea to announce it in a poem Priceless :)</p>
<p>S2 has been off school this week. Stress seems to have disappeared from his life. He has even started reviewing for APs …
He has been searching the website for next year classes
Today, he received a nice congratulation phone call from his interviewer who could not be happier to hear he had committed.</p>
<p>S1 is getting ready for his finals. Announced yesterday that he was 1/4 done with his college experience 
. Where has this year gone!</p>
<p>This is the first time we will not all be together for Easter 
His Easter basket/package was delivered to his dorm today :)</p>
<p>Wishing all on the SS Indecision a safe night.</p>
<p>Keeping the fire going so you can find your way to shore :)</p>
<p>Waving to all lurking Rm,Cm,et cie</p>
<p>FlMathMom ~ Congrats on Rice! What a nice poem you got from your S too!</p>
<p>fogfog ~ I can’t find where you made your announcement about Yale, but congrats!</p>
<p>Hello, everyone!</p>
<p>We were on a trip to visit 3 colleges and I am hopelessly behind the news. I read about 5 last pages and it covered only today and yesterday and I am amazed how many kids jumped the ship. I tried to find the drumroll thread but it wasnt on the first 2 pages of the parents forum so I gave up.</p>
<p>First of all, blueiguana and bluejr so sorry to learn about the loss of a schoolmate. Its so heartbreaking when a life so young is lost. Our community had experienced a similar tragedy. When we were on the trip my 5th grader learned that a classmate and her mother died in a car accident. Two 5th graders were sent home that day, because they couldnt stop crying. </p>
<p>FlMathmom Happy Birthday! And I loved the poem, especially how your DS rhymed check with Rice. He made an excellent choice! </p>
<p>We are still sailing. I am not sure if anyone else is still on the ship. I think they turned the AC down, the music band has left, the bar is closed and it looks deserted and spooky. But our college tour was certainly not useless; I think we are making some progress. </p>
<p>Here is a brief (I hope) synopsis of the trip. In the first 5 minutes after we checked in at our hotel our first day of the trip DS checked his e-mail and found out that he is a recipient of a full ride (plus summer at Oxford U, plus 5K grant for a research or service project) scholarship at the Duke U. We were expecting the announcement two days later, but I am glad we got it earlier, because we knew all our options from the start. </p>
<p>Anyway, Bulldog days at Yale were AMAIZING!!! Yale is definitely MY favorite school. I loved how after the Welcome address they had current students performing. Such talented kids and most of them are not majoring in performing arts. (By contrast Harvard hired a professional group to perform at their Visitas days). Son loved almost everything there, but was not impressed by the physics (his intendant major) department. Sorry, fogfog and HighHead, but I wont join you on the river. (I am not apologizing, I am really, really sorry that * my * dream got shattered).</p>
<p>Harvard was the opposite of Yale. S didnt feel it was a good fit for him, until he met with the physics faculty and students. He was amazed by the talent there and called it a game changer.
Stanford could have been the middle ground between the other two, but DS is not looking for compromises. He thinks that his decision will be either the best physics resources or the free option. </p>
<p>So, there we are reliving a lot of the classic Fiddler on the roof moments (on one hand but on the other hand ). Part of me wants for my S to go to the best school he got into. But on the other hand Duke is the Top 10 school, so he wont sacrifice too much. We dont mind paying for good education and college experience, but how bad can not paying for it be? </p>
<p>Anyway, I decided to give DS some room and not talk about the decision for couple days. Well see where we land soon enough.</p>
<p>keylimepie-as my father would say…these are the kind of problems that are GOOD to have
He really can’t go wrong either way!!</p>
<p>LOVE the setup of “check” with Rice. Very clever young man.</p>
<p>keylimepie, you are having a busy April, but as holliesue says, those are good problems to have. S is obviously choosing very carefully. Gotta love that full ride.</p>
<p>Thanks cjpm for the feedback on DD’s fab four schools! I love the humor of the upside down map. And thanks to everyone else who has responded her or PMd me. I do feel a little like I’m walking UP the gangplank while all the rest of you are either off the boat or getting close to disembarking. It’s awfully nice of you to stop and give me advice as you skip past me.</p>
<p>On the car question - DD had not planned to take a car to her original school (DH’s lease is up this summer and they were going to share her G6 until she left for school). She really didn’t need the car; her roommate (a close friend) and other kids she knows there would have gotten her home or I could have driven the 2 hours to get her if need be. I’m somewhat surprised that she has said she still doesn’t want a car despite the possibility that she may be hours from any of her relatives. (of course, two of the schools are so close to her grandparents and aunts/uncles that she may decide to go into witness protection just to get away from them).</p>
<p>
Ha ha! D’s school is in the same city as all of her grandparents, too! Plus an aunt and assorted cousins. I think she’s afraid they will drop by and visit all the time or something.</p>