Don’t be surprised if your freshman wants to do the following during break
- sleep alot
- make plans to see high school friends
Right. I’m thinking the night before thanksgiving will be a late night out with S19’s high school friends!
Written like a true parent of a teen. Not “be seeing high school friends”, but “make plans to see high school friends”…?
S19 also got his win qtr classes: partial differential eqs, freshman writing seminar, honors physics. They just do 3 classes per qtr. He was worried about his writing class since the prof is ‘brutal’ and ‘mean’. I pestered him on specfics and he said she is known for editting harshly and holding you to a high standard. You’ll come out a much better writer but will go through a crucible to get there. I told him that sounded like a great prof! He also didn’t like that it was afternoon. Why? I asked. ‘it will cut into my ski time.’ Lol. It meets TTh only!
He is drinking from the fun firehose while still managing to do well in classes. Fun = Outing Club for him. There are meetings and activities with that every day for him. I think he also has gone partying (this is Dartmouth after all) but I haven’t heard much about that besides the concerts and dance parties.
He made it into Boston and NYC with friends too for sporting events. He has to pay all his own entertainment costs and with his campus job paying only $11 an hour, he is trying to figure out how to navigate going out on the town with friends who have much more disposable income. The equally split check at restaurants is killing him and he’ll have to let his friends know he’s on a more limited budget soon.
@mommdc So true about the break plans! But you forgot eating. S19 has already been home Labor Day weekend and fall break, and both times were major eat-family-favorites events. And with Thanksgiving, it will be even more so.
Re: the high school friends…I very much miss “the gang” who used to be at my house a lot. Hoping that when they get together (they will) that they come here again.
@liska21 s19’s first paper was ripped apart and I mean ripped! He sent me a photo of it with all of the comments. There was more red on the pages than black. Sign me up for that. Isn’t that what we’re paying for? It was almost comical.
S19 went to meet with the prof and learned so much. Next paper? Took him twice the amount of time but pulled out at A. He’s learning. It’s all good!
With your S’s schedule, it will be good for him to take a non-stem class as the third class. The other two will be all problem sets and writing will be a good break from that. I’m sure he’ll make time for skiing. Five out of seven days open for afternoon skiing might work. Lol.
QFT
The plan during thanksgiving break: I will pick her and her roommate up from the airport at 6am on Tuesday (she takes the red eye from SFO). She will sleep for most of the day, then spa/mani/pedi appointment late afternoon just with me, her and her roommate.
Wednesday sleep in then all day with her HS friends (told me not to make any plans wit her). Thanksgiving day, sleep in, 20 of her friends will come over whenever they are done with dinner at their house, play game and sleep over.
Friday again wit her friends, shopping or whatever. Saturday she hangs out with us doing family thing. Sunday she is flying back to school.
We are the outliers again, I guess? D has no plans over thanksgiving with anyone other than us. We will eat L, watch a movie, and then switch to Christmas mode- unboxing the decorations, picking out a Christmas tree, and doing all the decorating.
D19 will be at school over Thanksgiving. One of her friends has already scheduled a birthday party outing while D is here (can’t say home because D has already made clear college is home) for Christmas. D’s local friends have never been her close friends so she’s not too excited about spending lots of time with them.
She is taking care of business when she’s here: dentist appointment, hair cut, changing out some clothes, getting her resume updated for the job fair that her college is hosting in January. She’s hoping she won’t be living in our small town next summer.
But, I do know she will have a list of favorite foods for us to serve & eat out spots to visit while she’s back.
DD is definitely planning time with her sister & their boyfriends next weekend. Maybe just Sunday, maybe most of the weekend. Day before Thanksgiving she’s taking a friend still in HS shopping. There is one HS friend she hasn’t seen since August so she’s on the list, and another she’s only seen once but she doesn’t have the whole week off. We’ll see what gets done.
The thing DH wants to get done with her is upgrading his cell phone and handing his down to her. So we need a time when he’s not working and she doesn’t have plans, and need to back up to iTunes before and re-load content after.
You’re not alone, @milgymfam. D cut ties with most of her high school friends. We’ll have a family-centered Thanksgiving and get in a couple days of skiing before she returns to school.
My D19 and S16 are coming home the Wednesday morning before Thanksgiving. They go to the same school so S16 is driving both of them home (2 hours away).
My D19 asked if we could host Friendsgiving on the Friday after Thanksgiving. Of course! That will be great to have all the girls back under our roof for the day. Can’t wait!
D19 has picked all of her classes (2 weeks ago). . She got all of the ones she wanted. She likes the 9:30am classes to start her day, so 4 days she got that time slot and one day she got an 8am time slot (a day bomb - which is a 3 hour class held only once a week). My S16 has picked his last semester of classes. I can’t believe he is graduating in May. These four years have really flown by! He will graduate with an Econ-finance major and two minors (one minor with an entrepreneurship concentration and another with something to do with international
studies).
I am worried about next weekend - but I am “letting go” and letting her do her own thing. My D19 and her new friends at college are taking a road trip to Montreal for the weekend (from Boston). Augh! I will say though that they planned it very well with two cars and an AirBnb for 9 people. Plus they made it the weekend prior to Thanksgiving since they only have 2 days of school after their road trip and no big assignments or tests scheduled. But still - its a road trip - the first of many I’m sure - so we’ll have to trust that she is planning well and mature enough to do these kinds of trips. At 18 I don’t feel like we can say no unless the plan was ill conceived.
She has also applied for a habitat for humanity spring break trip. That trip I am excited about and I really hope she gets chosen to go.
Lol that’s what DH said when I relayed the story to him!
Re the morning versus afternoon classes, we called S19 this afternoon and I told him I thought he should do the 8:50am class to have afternoons free for the club sports he wants to do. Really it’s not that early. His sister does 8am classes all the time. There was a long quiet pause. ‘Um, the early class I’m worried about is 10am not 8:50am.’ !!! I laughed and asked how could he possibly think that 10am was early when he got up at 6am for practice all through high school. ‘Yeah, but it’s 10am on a Thursday.’ ‘So?’ ‘Well…um…Wednesday is an “on” night.’ (on=party night at his school). Oh dear. Well, we’ll see what he decides.
My D19 won’t be home for Thanksgiving—it’s a 14-hour slog to fly there to here (including changing planes twice, or else traveling a few hour to get to an airport with better connections), plus a 3-hour time difference, so winter break is just barely practical, and Thanksgiving certainly isn’t.
Her grandparents live ~4 hours away, though, so she’ll be visiting them. She did get some offers to spend Thanksgiving weekend with a couple families from her church congregation, though—so it was good to find out that she’s developing a supportive network nearby aside from her friends on campus!
S19 has the entire week off for Thanksgiving. No fall break at Penn State. Guess this is the reward for slogging from August until Thanksgiving. LOL! I’m making the run up to retrieve him and his good friend from home on Friday. They both want to head out right when classes wrap.
He didn’t call last night like he has done since the start of the year I’m taking this a really good sign. He was in great spirits during our last call. Apparently, we’ve had a social breakthrough from the depths of the vast people forest of Penn State. Never underestimate the power of finally finding just a few other freshmen to play D&D with. LOL!
They broke off from the bigger gaming club and S19 was in the right place at the time to join 'em. Saw a flyer posted and made contact right away. He even ended up hosting the group’s first gathering. “It’s just like you said, Mom,” he shared. “It just takes time.” 
Another big source of stress has also been taken care of. Housing. They have to do this so early which puts some stress on freshmen who haven’t really been there long enough to form “hey, let’s live together next year” connections by October when decisions have be made. After both going random with roommates to branch out, the friend from high school (well, preschool really!) who is riding home with us and S19 decided to stay on campus and room together next year. And the friend apparently will not mind if S19 has to get up at 4am for ROTC. LOL!
S19 managed all of these decisions and made all of the arrangements on his own. He also locked down his schedule for next semester. All Mr. InfiniteWaves and I have done along the way is say “sounds like a great plan!”
I’m hoping that he didn’t call last night because he was happy and busy. He did go the football game (his first at PSU) on Saturday. Maybe he was still, uh, “tired” from that?!? 
@InfiniteWaves Love that post!
@dfbdfb It’s good to know there are congregation members looking out for her! When we visited the one far away school, we talked to the Pastor of the church she would have gone to and he said the families loved adopting the college students when needed. That made us feel better though in the end she didn’t go there. Where she is she does have some adult connections close by. Our former pastor is in her college town, and a church camp friend is a newly minted professor there. And her aunt is 30 minutes away and in town frequently.
@Stuffedquahog I always cringe at the road trip ideas…though I feel better if DD doesn’t volunteer to drive LOL. The last one proposed to me was Missouri to Nashville but I don’t know that any of the others will follow through on plans due to cost so maybe that will quietly go by the wayside.
Also she is welcome to go on her boyfriend’s spring vacation with his dad but she would probably have to miss class (and possibly rehearsals which would make it a no go) and it probably will be in Mexico so I don’t know how I feel about that. IDK whether to go ahead and get her a passport soon just in case or not.
“It’s just like you said, Mom,” he shared. “It just takes time.”
@InfiniteWaves such a lovely post. Put a huge smile on my face. Have a great Thanksgiving week with your guy!!
@InfiniteWaves - so great that your son is finding his group of friends and that your advice/ encouragement worked. It’s also very impressive that a teenage boy acknowledged it and gave you credit!
Kiddo isn’t going to be home for Thanksgiving - they give 0 days off for it in Scotland. There are a lot of American students at St. Andrews so I understand that there are a lot of private parties around town for those who celebrate. We would love to afford to go over there and see him, but that’s not in the budget this year.
They’re having unplanned time off next week anyhow, though. University professors across the UK are striking about something the government did to their pensions. I hadn’t realized it - all UK professors are technically government workers? Anyhow, they’ve been working hard to get all the classwork done by this week and all the essays and papers are due.
And, true to form, there was an electrical fault in the medieval history building and they had to shut it down for the foreseeable future. Classes, tutorials and lectures all rescheduled elsewhere.
Kiddo did really well on midterms. Apparently this year’s grades have nothing to do with their final grade point average, so as long as they get over 7/20 they pass on to next year and their grades after that determine whether they get a first class or second class degree (there are also third class degrees for people who barely scrape through). Kiddo is determined to do First level work this year, though. He says he doesn’t want to get into lazy habits.
They sign up for all their classes at the beginning of the year. They have 3 classes per semester, and 2 of them are determined by the course DS is registered for so he really only had one elective. So he chose medieval history. He’s not taking it next year. He said that only one of the lecturers is good, the others make the most interesting stuff yawningly boring. If he could be guaranteed to get the interesting guy he’d be all for it, but it apparently doesn’t work that way.
Housing arrangements start next semester. They don’t guarantee housing for returning students and there is a general shortage of affordable housing in town. One of DS’s friends has an older brother who is graduating this year, and their family owns a four bedroom flat in town. Assumption is that friend is moving into the flat. So I asked kiddo if he was making a push to take one of the other rooms and he just verbally shrugged. Why tell me about this if you’re not going to do anything about it? Grr. Hoping he figures it out before he ends up sleeping on a park bench. He seems to be happy with his dorm life and the dorm food, so I’m somewhat hoping he gets an offer to stay in the same place next year. But that’s his decision and he needs to handle the logistics.