Yes, my kid finally came to his senses and chose a reasonable vehicle. It would not be my first choice but it should be dependable and hopefully safe.
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@1923girls - from 5 days ago re: giving up club soccer. . . .
I hope things go well with her and you. My guess is that she will find some new hobbies and interests, and try out some new opportunities that sheâll like, and Iâm sure she has some memories, skills and confidence from playing that long. I have been through that âgut wrenchingâ feeling as a parent when kids leave their club sports after its been such a part of our lives. I will say itâs sad to let go of those dreams, camaraderie, friends and competition, but I do think it turns out all good in the end.
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Agree. S left a sport where he practiced 6 hours a day 6 days a week and was the national champion and truly Olympic level talent. Two things. Make sure they have some sort of exercise or adjust their eating habits. And plan something for yourself. My S quickly picked up a theater addiction, but I never developed the deep friendships I had from his sport and the lack of daily outdoor time still bothers me. Soccer is sort of the same. I suspect you spent a good portion of your life sitting outdoors at practices and games having light conversations. You will miss that more than you know and probably have to make a concerted effort to replace it.
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My D23 just had to make the decision to drop ballet after 10 years of classes and performing. She never did it at a super serious level, but they got to do the most popular version of the Nutcracker in our area, plus a summer and spring show every year. Alas, it was a Covid casualty at first, and then when classes resumed she just was never able to jump back in with the kind of effort it was going to require to pick up where she left off pre-Covid. And I totally agree, that while itâs bittersweet for her, it is for me as well! I will really miss helping out backstage and making sure all the props and scenery make their cues and just the general camaraderie of the other parents and kids. It hit me harder than I thought it would.
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There is a separate thread for kids that are non high-stats. Hope you stick around and participate.
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My D23 took jazz percussion lessons from 4th through 8th grades, when she decided she didnât want to do that anymore after sheâd gotten to a decent performance level (and she really does have a knack for it, it just wasnât her thing). She declared a screeching halt to it at that point, but it gave her the basis for pretty much everything sheâs done since in terms of future college and career plans, so Iâm not really complaining, no matter how âYouâre throwing away all that effort??â it felt at the time.
Received an email from D23âs guidance counselor that she has an unfixable issue with her schedule. Two of her classes are only offered during (the same) one period a day, so she had to choose which one she would continue with and which class she would drop.
Needless to say, a bit of drama not enjoyed here. Tears due to having to drop music, as it conflicted with her foreign language class. Thankfully, guidance counselor is very kind, patient and experienced and they (D23 and GC) found an acceptable replacement for the opening in her schedule - AP Psych has been added.
Fingers crossed this is the only bit of schedule drama we will see, schedules came out fairly early but tons of issues from what Iâve heard from other parents.
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We had tons of problems this year with schedules for next year too. My S ended up taking one of the classes online. Cause that worked so well for him during the pandemic 
Youâve put this schedule snafu into perspective for sure. While she will miss music, she is so looking forward to having all her classes in person.
My kids (s23 and d25) walked a bit around ASU campus. Correction: SHE said it was too big, S23 said it was just âfineâ. Not sure that quite helps with size and fit but its a start.
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Jacey, I am about to set up my kid with an affordable one-on-one tutor (virtual sessions) here in the NE. Lemme know via DM if you want the info!
I might be interested - I think virtual would work if itâs one-on-one; otherwise, he would space out. Please send information. Thank you for thinking of me!! 
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S23 is really not making good choices lately. He is taking dual credit English 3 this summer and has found little to no motivation to staying connected to the class. On top of that, my brother in law gave him his old 2006 car which he was absolutely thrilled about. We finally got the title situation sorted out (needed certain signatures and such) but what does S23 do once itâs sorted out? Spends $700 on building a new computer that he now cannot get to work and has pretty much thrown the towel in. Mind boggling that he would make such a rash decision (he hasnât before) to spend this money knowing full well that he will need $$ for registration/inspection for his car. He was so excited about the car and was super antsy about getting title but has since sat on it when his interest shifted to building new computer. I donât get it. DH & I are having a hard time sitting on our hands watching him do this but he has to learn, right? Sigh.
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My son is the same way. My mom sent me this article which makes a lot of sense about how teenagers think.
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Hi. This is not my forum (I have a D22) but I just wanted to share that my D22 is really enjoying her summer STEM program (Garcia at Stony Brook University) and to encourage D/S23s who are interested in exploring STEM careers to apply for 2022 summer programs during the upcoming year.
For my D22, sheâs getting to know a broader set of high school peers, is learning about different fields of science (from presentations by academics and industry researchers) and will soon have much more substantive lab experience than is available at her HS. As a parent, I think itâs a great way for D22 to spend her rising senior summer and figure out whether STEM is really right for her.
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Can a student-led club that is not affiliated with a school give out volunteer hours?
@ghermione - i think volunteering with a student group is a great way to give back to your community/school or whatever. Teachers and adults donât have to be involved. However, if you need those hours to count towards something official, like National Honor Society, or school mandated community service hours, youâll probably need an adult to sign off on them, so if you need that, make sure you include a sponsor of some sort.
my kid and his school friends put together a neat community project with no adults involved, basically planned out of boredom on a summer day. He was featured in our townâs newspaper, and won a national grant of $1K to carry it on. The third year they did it, some of his friends asked me to sign off on NHS hours (because it was in our garage), but until that point it had nothing to do with adults. (a neighborhood haunted house and coat drive.)
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Time to report on a few more tours!
- Loyola University New Orleans. (How many Loyolas are there, anyway? Feels like dozens sometimes.) This is yet another red-brick campus (but this time with dark red bricks!), with the exception of the original early-20th-century looking administration building that appears in their logo and pretty much all their promotional materials, plus the very weirdly out of place hypermodernist business building. The tour itself was very individualized, with a single tour guide assigned to our family (and it appeared that one tour guide per prospective student is the norm there, we just happened to have two prospectives). Itâs quite a small campus, and it shows in the fact that the tour was less than a mile. There was no info session, but the tour guide gave pretty much all the information weâdâve gotten in one anyway, so no worries. It turns out that they have a lot of students who want to do what D23 wants to do, and even though they donât have a program that looks on paper perfectly suited to it they do have a pretty settled pathway for making it happen, so that was good to hear. As with many small colleges right next to a big one, there are some connectionsâLoyola students have access to the Tulane library (not that unusual) and the Tulane dining hall (much less usual); there is cross-registration, but itâs pretty limited. Iâd say that it says something positive about the college that even though we visited on a thickly-clouded day with occasional sputters of rain (and distant rumbles of thunder!), both of the kids came out of it liking the place. (And D23 also absolutely fell in love with New Orleans after being there a couple days, but D25 wasnât nearly quite as sold on the city.)
- Ursinus College in Collegeville, Pennsylvania, which we toured largely to give D25 an idea of what a traditional small liberal arts college is likeâthey donât offer D25âs intended major. (Some of the other places weâre touring this summer call themselves liberal arts colleges, but theyâve added graduate or professional programs rather than remaining purely undergrad-focused.) Itâs a small college in terms of both number of students and campus sizeâthis was a three-quarter mile loop at close to the usual one-mile-per-hour pace of a college tour, and we covered pretty much the whole campus. The architecture was largely the flagstone you get in older buildings in that part of the country, plus some more modern takes on building facades that matched decently well, and that made for an attractive change of pace from the red bricks all (all!) of the other campuses weâve toured were built withâand the landscaping was beautiful in a tree-filled and parklike but non-showy way. We were the only ones there for the morning tour, and so we got a very individualized info session with an admissions counselor and then had the walking tour, which was led by the single most conversational tour guide weâve had. (D25 thinks one of the Middle Tennessee tour guides was his equal on those terms, but weâll just have to agree to disagree on that.) Of note, most campus tours arenât taking anyone into the dorms due to ongoing pandemic issues, but of those that included dorm spaces, this was the first campus tour that led us into one of the traditional-style communal washrooms as a sort of âReally, it isnât scary like some people think.â Overall, D25 canât imagine herself at a place thatâs that small, while D25 is quite conflictedâshe liked it, but itâs so different from anything else weâve seen to this point that it makes her a bit nervous. Iâm curious to see whether she warms to smaller colleges as she goes along. (Swag disclosure: They each got a t-shirt.)
- Seton Hall University in South Orange, New Jersey. After dealing with even worse traffic than Jersey usually provides, we got to the campus and settled in for an info session. Both kids found the info session uninspiring, to put it mildly (though D23 allows that it was informative, at least), and so they didnât have high hopesâbut both of them were utterly impressed by the tour that followed. Our tour guide was a recent graduate of Seton Hall working for the admissions office while she was waiting for grad school to start in the fall, and she was both informative and personable (also: the first tour guide weâve had who walked backward most of the time). We saw pretty much all of the campus, which is small in terms of areaâbut oddly, it seemed larger than Ursinusâs campus the previous day. (Maybe because the buildings are packed closer together? Iâm not sure.) There were a lot of pauses in the tourâI mean, there always are, but this one had more than mostâincluding a stop where we all sat down in a classroom and the tour guide took questions, and I will say, as someone who teaches in a college classroom regularly, I was quite impressed with the way she got people to ask her stuff rather than just staying silent. One really interesting thing is that neither my spouse nor I found the campus all that attractive (no real discernible overall architectural vision; I would describe it as utilitarian at best, iâm not sure the spouse would be even that positive), but both of the kids found it to be quite pretty (and honestly, theyâre the ones whose opinions count most on that score). One bonus for D23 is that of all the colleges weâve visited so far, Seton Hall is one of the few (basically, itâs them and Belmont) that had at the ready detailed descriptions of how they line up the sorts of internships she would need to have worked into her degree program. On the whole, both of the kids were quite impressed, and theyâre keeping it in mind as a possibility.
- Temple University. This ended up being our first non-loop tourâwe began at the welcome center and ended at a memorial fountain, and had to rely on our sense of direction from there. (That but of leaving it up to the prospectives to fill in their own needed pieces seemed kind of on brand, as youâll see.) The tour itself was both positive and negative compared to the other toursâit was the first one weâve had where the tour guide actually spoke loudly enough (seriously, colleges, either train your tour guides to project their voices or do like Middle Tennessee and buy them portable microphones!), but it was also the most generic tour weâve had. Like, other tours have had large groups and thus no individualized personalization, but this really did feel like there was something close to a script that the tour guide had been trained to stick to and it all seemed, well, canned. (I guess at some level it makes sense as far as efficiency goesâthey were seriously churning out sizable tour groups one after the otherâbut it almost makes it feel like the message is âYouâre going to apply here anyway, so why do we need to be interesting?â) Temple has what canât just be described as an urban campus, but rather a very urban campusâitâs a contiguous campus, but most of the street grid between buildings isnât blocked off. As might be expected from that, thereâs no single architectural style, but rather a mashup of the sorts of buildings you expect in an office-type building streetscape. Both D23 and D25 found it visually appealing (unlike their parents), but touring the campus resulted in both of them (and perhaps especially D23) realizing that they didnât want to attend a campus that screamed âCity!â quite so loudlyâtheyâre good with urban, but they want a campus thatâs connected to rather than simply overlaid onto that urban environment.
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THANK YOU!!
LoyNO is on my sons list. I know its a very small and old looking school. But I too could see my kids loving New Orleans overall so having it be close by could be a positive.
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@dfbdfb Thanks so much for the reviews!
Funny how kids are - my kid loved Temple precisely because it screamed âCity!â Penn is a bit more insular, if you got a chance to take a peek at that. Duquesne - whoops, I meant Drexel! - I found very much like Temple in its overlay onto city streets.
We are headed to Pitt in 2 weeks; will see how the compare & contrast goes.
I would love for S23 to end up in NO but I donât see any school coming within budget, so we have no school from there on the list right now. Itâs my favorite US city, no contest, even with the humidity and heat, which I hate. Music and food just wins out
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