Started lurking in 2009 when an acceptance thread came up in my Google search for DS1. Signed up in July 2015. First post just over two years later, August 2017. Found great sanity checks here for my kids’ more stressed moments (“Will I get rescinded if I get an A-?” threads, I’m looking at you!) and mine as well. So much fun, wisdom, and kindness here!
I’m surprised how many people waited quite a long time to post! I think I did lurk for a bit - but not too long because I had QUESTIONS!!! 
@abasket Did I not mention the clairvoyance here? Whenever I had questions, they’d already been asked and answered. All I had to do was look them up and report back if needed. CC made me look good!
I joined in 2006. I was running a consulting that I had co-founded in the 90s and teaching one week a year at the business school where I had taught for six years at the beginning of my career. I had just completed a major book with a professor from that school. ShawWife was a painter mostly showing in our local area (though she was very well-known in the area). In 2006, I had a HS sophomore who was ridiculously gifted but severely dyslexic and experience a lot of fatigue (which we later learned was caused by sleep apnea). He found most of the HS honors curriculum to be trivial, but was exhausted doing all of the homework. I also had an 7th or 8th grader who was also quite bright but had a major vision problem that was originally incorrectly diagnosed as a degenerative genetic condition much like macular degeneration. I think by 8th grade we had gotten a correct diagnosis and she was completing the therapy to fix the condition. I had gotten phenomenal useful advice to help my son from a website called schwablearning.org, that had been established by the Schwab Foundation. Unfortunately, they took it down after ten years – they actually sold it to a private company that decimated it. So, I was seeking help for dealing with the challenges of an exhausted, truly gifted dyslexic kid who was bored with school and I found CC.
I got very useful assistance with our first decision, which was a recommendation by the Dep. Superintendent of Schools to enable ShawSon to be partially homeschooled. This would allow him to learn how to write independently of a fairly useless English department and do the math at his pace. But, then we had questions about where to send a kid like this and how to apply given that he was neither homeschooled nor schooled. He chose to have surgery for the sleep apnea but deferred this until a gap year (which I thought was a great idea). To deal with the exhaustion, I suggested he not take SATs/ACTs or apply to colleges until his gap year. I think we got help here on how to appeal accommodations decisions of The College Board. @xiggi’s tips on SATs were also a big help. The good news: he did extremely well on standardized tests and his HS grades were excellent and he got into many places. At my suggestion, he chose an elite LAC with no meaningful distribution requirements over an Ivy. He graduated summa cum laude, started a company while he was a senior, ran it for 1.5 years, then got into an MBA/MS Data Science at the best school in the world for his fields. He started a company in his last year there, with his partner raised a $3.1 MM seed round from Silicon Valley VCs. His company and he have gotten recognition in national publications.
When I started thinking about colleges for ShawD, I was participating in the Colleges for the B student and Colleges for for the Jewish B student threads as she was a) not intellectually curious except in human biology and statistics; and b) not performing as well as her brother. However, once we cleared up the vision issue, she was diagnosed with ADHD (which should have been obvious but we were focusing on other things) and once she started getting extra time and especially taking Ritalin, her performance improved to the A-/A level at a very competitive private school. She was still an anxious kid and decided to only apply in Canada (she’s a dual US/Canadian citizen) because the holistic admissions process and the pressure of her private school were really making her anxious. She knew she would get in to the Canadian schools to which she applied. All good, but at the beginning of her first semester, she called and asked if she could shift her major from biology to nursing because she didn’t want to work in a lab and nursing was much more practical. ShawD’s Canadian school was going to make her reapply as a freshman to the Faculty of Nursing. @downtoearth, who was a nurse that I new from the Class of 2009 thread (which had/has a lot of really helpful folks), agreed to help ShawD shadow a nurse at her hospital over winter break, and when ShawD loved it, @downtoearth suggested three local school from which her hospital hired and told us the one she liked. ShawD applied and got in for the spring semester to an accelerated BSN/MSN program that she mostly loved and is now in her second year of working as a Family Nurse Practitioner, a job that she loves. A doctor recently told her that despite the fact that she was very young (25), she was the smartest NP she’d ever worked with. Patients love her. In a great story, @downtoearth later applied to the same MSN program and ShawD helped her with at least one of her classes.
With our nest empty, ShawWife’s art career has flourished – she has had a couple of one person shows at a high end gallery in Manhattan and has a show at another high end gallery in London this year and some museums have purchased her work. I’m still running my company but have co-founded a tech company in the Bay Area that just received a $3.5 MM seed round. Plus, I’ve done some pretty exciting pro bono work and am still doing my one week of teaching. If I can find a co-author or ghostwriter, I have another book to write. I’m not planning on retiring but I find the thread of “How much do you need before you retire” to be very helpful. We’re obviously thirteen years older than when I first came here, but I can say that things are working very well at the moment and that we are grateful for the help we have gotten from many folks, including those at CC and especially @downtoearth, who helped ShawD find her career and school.
I joined in 2010 when D was just applying to colleges. 2nd kid came the next year. Both went to great schools and have a happy lovely career now living in their hometown of San Francisco. I retired early and my DH is semi-retired but still enjoys focusing on investing in the stock market. I travel quite a bit and spend the rest of the time grateful that I could retire relatively early — at 60.
I joined in 2005 when youngest dd was looking at colleges I had never heard of and I found all sorts of information here. This site opened up my eyes to many possibilities for her. In our area, it seems as if every child goes to community college or a state school but partly because of cc, dd ended up at a small liberal arts school that fit her to a t.
I enjoy this site as it is so friendly and helpful. I have gotten travel information, housing for the same dd in big cities, wedding advise and both of my kids are amazed at how incredibly helpful and supportive this community has been for me. I love seeing all the posters on this thread. I, too, remember you mcat2! I have become facebook friends with another poster.