Kid Whirlwind and College

My life has been crazy so I haven't been blogging regularly.
People say, "Oh, too many classes to teach?" But really, most of the craziness comes from my kids.
We knew when Tucker was born (our 3rd) that we had surpassed our limits as parents, but it was too late to go back; we could only go forward. And, we love all of our kids passionately (which might be part of the problem), but their worries and woes frequently weigh on us and take a lot of time.

Famous columns from a building that burned down
years ago on the campus of Mizzou

Problems are working out and in the next few days, I hope to spill the whole story about an incident that made me feel like I was living out an episode of The Sopranos.
For today, I'm enjoying the knowledge that I don't have to go to work today because it is finals week for one of the colleges where I teach.
I also relished a 6-mile run that ended at Starbucks.

This is the indoor water park and giant hot tub at Mizzou

Mostly though,  my happiness comes from the fact that I'm very relieved my youngest son has chosen a college that is within a two-hour drive. He was leaning toward a college eight hours away and I had to beg him to reconsider.
When Spencer's phone broke, it took a tremendous amount of effort and calling in favors from old friends in the area to get him a new phone while he lived 16 hours away and had no way to communicate or get to the store.
When Grace was sick at school 10 hours away, she had to walk herself to the hospital for blood tests and walk herself to the pharmacy for medicine.
Yes, it helps them learn responsibility, but it leaves me a nervous wreck.
Tucker knew these stories and stuck to his plan to attend Mizzou -- the University of Missouri.
When we visited, I didn't even think he like it that much. He was anxious to get back on the road home.
And we have no contacts in Missouri -- no old friends to call on, no family to fall back on.
Finally on Tuesday, I told him the story about leaving his sister and brother at college.
It wasn't as bad with Grace because the college, 10 hours from home, had a plan. They had a convocation, complete with bagpipes and lit candles. Then each dorm broke up into groups to begin activities. Parents were expected to give hugs and move on to the parking lot.
I'll never forget Grace's eyes bright with tears as she stood in a circle of her dorm mates then turned around and gave us a pleading look. We walked out, but that was easier than when we left Spencer.
We moved Spencer into his college dorm room over 1000 miles from home. The school had a convocation
ceremony and then a picnic. We ate. We talked with families around us and then we needed to move on to my parents' house about 90 minutes away. Spencer walked us to our car and we left him there in the parking lot -- alone.
I just couldn't do that with Tucker.
"I know you'll make friends," I told Tucker, "but it's so hard on my to leave you there alone."
Tucker didn't respond to my story so I dropped it.
I had told him he needed to figure out what steps to take next for going to Mizzou. I had to support him.
Two days later, he said he guessed he could go to a college in Ohio. He would room with his best friend Josh and the two of them would have two unknown roommates so they didn't get stuck in a rut with only kids from our hometown.
"You can go to Mizzou," I said. "I don't want  you to choose just for me."
But he had talked it over and they made plans and the relief I felt washed over me. He can catch a bus home for $10. I can be there in two hours if he is hurt or sick. I can drive down a new phone. Or I can go down for lunch if he, or I, feel lonely.
So today is full of paperwork, making sure he accepts the school's offer. I also have to grade papers and get final grades in. Look into changing our insurance company. Deal with some payments to Spencer's schools.
In spite of the busy work, underneath it all, I'm so happy that Tucker won't be going far away.

Spring Breaks

I am on the cusp of spring breaks for my kids. Grace's spring break is wrapping up while Spencer and Tucker are both beginning their spring breaks.
Grace's spring break has been fairly laid back. She went to a local Irish bar to celebrate St. Patrick's Day.
She tried out for a spring production, The Graduate, and got the part of Elaine -- that's Mrs. Robinson's daughter for anyone who doesn't remember. And Benjamin falls in love with Elaine after having the affair with Mrs. Robinson. I think she'll do a great job.
We ate lots of yummy meals, like breakfasts of chocolate croissants or croissants, and goat cheese pasta, and we cracked open a bottle of dessert wine to go with some chocolate lava cakes. Yum.
We also did some babysitting for Grant, Earl's niece's son.

Look at the belly on that little guy! He's 14 months old and almost always in a good mood.
I love spending time with Grace and hate to see her going back to school, but I know that's what happens with kids grow up.
Spencer goes to college in Florida, so I could hardly hope for him to come back to cold Ohio. Instead, he went to Miami. He is staying at a friend's parents' condo on Miami Beach.
I texted him yesterday asking, "How is Miami?"
Here's the picture he responded with:

I haven't seen Spencer since January. I miss see him.

This morning, Tucker and I are leaving on a road trip. One more college visit before he has to decide.

Maybe -- but doubtful -- I'll get a picture of me and Tucker on our road trip. That boy avoids the camera. I tell him he'll regret it someday.

So we're driving 9 hours to Missouri. Hope he likes the campus. I'd love for him to fall in love with a college and be passionate about going there.

Here's a photo from his birthday.

Hope you all get a chance to relax and enjoy some decent weather this spring. At our destination, they're predicting snow.

College Money Makers

I'm not sure why it took until my third child for me to realize the money making schemes that colleges have going on. I'm not talking about the outrageous tuition either. That's another story.
Colleges make money on people who will never attend there. Some of whom will not even get accepted.
Maybe I'm just realizing it because my other kids focused on small colleges. When they applied to college, they usually had fees waived to apply.
Big public schools though don't waive fees. To apply at Ohio State University costs $60. Last year, about 12,000 students applied to attend, which would bring in around $720,000 just in application fees. Of those 12,000, 7,186 new freshman began attending OSU. I don't know how many of them were not accepted and how many of them chose to go to college somewhere else.
One college that Tucker has been thinking about this year is the University of Miami in Florida. Its communications school has a good reputation, so we planned to let him apply there. Then I looked at the information about the average freshman attending U of Miami. The average, average GPA (grade point of average) of incoming freshman was 4.2. Now 4.0 is a perfect GPA. That means the student received straight As throughout high school.  Yet for U of M, the average was 4.2 which means half the students had higher GPAs than that. (Okay, my math skills aren't great but it must be a number of students with higher GPAs).

U of M was giving Tucker a pretty hard press to apply and when I saw the average GPA, I pointed out that he did not have a GPA nearly high enough to get into the school. The application fee was $70. So the schools work very hard sending out letters, emails, making phone calls to get students to apply even when they can never be accepted into the school.
Then I looked at the U of M statistics and they will receive 28,900 applications. At 70 bucks per student, that's over $2 million in application fees. Only 2000 students will be accepted.

So that's when I began to realize that college applications are a scam too.
One friend told me that her son decided to apply at colleges that don't have an application fee then to go visit the places where he was accepted.
Tucker wants to attend a large college though, so I suppose there isn't a way to avoid paying fees. I am trying to limit the fees to schools I think might be a good fit.

Spring Break

It's definitely spring, and my boys have a break from school, but I still have to teach. So Earl and Spencer left in the dark of Saturday morning to drive to Florida for a college visit.
The two-day visit started yesterday at noon and was supposed to end with a bonfire on the beach last night, but apparently Spencer met some friends and brought them back to the hotel on the beach where he and Earl are staying.
Spencer's first response to the visit was that there was a lot of talking that he had to listen to. Sitting and listening to people talk is not Spencer's thing.
But during a lull in the talking, he did get to grab his basketball from the car and play on a huge court with a high canopy over it to shade it from the sun.
He made friends with a guy from Maryland who is visiting the college too, and that guy with his parents headed out to the beach. The parents sat with Earl in a bar while the guys trolled the night time beach and swam in the pool. I don't know how late they hung out, but this morning Earl said he is trying to get Spencer out of bed after he was partying late with his buddy.
Tucker opted not to go along on the trip because he is running track and he started a lifeguarding class. So I took Tucker and his friend Josh out to dinner at Olive Garden yesterday. They ordered some sort of upmarket lemonade and then decided it was a good thing they were secure in their masculinity since the drinks looked very fancy.
The boys have Twitter accounts (I don't even know how that works) and they kept bugging me "to Tebow" in front of the Olive Garden so they could tweet it. ("Tebowing" is that kneeling with your head bent in prayer like the football player Tim Tebow does.) I finally did, knowing they were making fun of me and that I would never see the picture anyway. So be on the lookout for a picture of me "tebowing" in front of an Olive Garden. Of course, when I dropped Josh off at home, his mom came out and said her other son had already showed her the picture of me. I'm sure I'm a legend in our little town now.

College Equals Fun

On August 1st, the results were released by The Princeton Review of the top party schools in the country.
On August 2nd, we were walking the campus of the number one party school in the country.
Of course, we were not part of the rush to tour campus because of its number one ranking. We had made the appointment a few weeks before in an effort to visit colleges before Spencer's senior year begins.
We're having a tough time narrowing down colleges because Spencer doesn't know what he wants to major in or whether he wants to go to a big or small college or whether he wants it to be located in a city or in the country.
"I want it to be fun," he told us after the first visit to a college in a small town, which did not stand up to his criteria of fun.
Well, with the new rankings by The Princeton Review, it appears that Ohio University meets the only criteria that Spencer set.
I will have to say that OU has had a party reputation since before I went to college. My best friend from high school went to OU, joined a sorority, graduated on time. She turned out fine.
The campus is charming, set in a town the same size as the student population. This is definitely a college town. The town actually butts into the college. Spencer was impressed with the workout facility. The major of Wildlife and Conservation Biology also caught his eye. He perked up at the idea of playing intramural basketball because they could create their own teams without having a coach or anyone to tell them what to do.
His friend Hayden came along although he had toured the campus before. Hayden, who has a twin brother, has gone on a number of tours and has remained unmoved, according to his mother. Yesterday, Hayden and Spencer seemed convinced that OU, which just happens to be the number one party school, is the right place for them.
We've got another visit set up next Tuesday that takes us to a smaller school that doesn't fall any where in the rankings on the party school list. Let's see if they can up the "fun" quotient.

College Search

Spencer will be a senior next year, which means it's past time for us to start looking for a college. We've made only one college visit and he was underwhelmed with the small college where I graduated. "Didn't seem very fun" was his observation. Okay, now we've established the parameters. College must be fun. Is that all we're looking for?
The thing is, even though I've sent one kid off to college, I don't know how to search for colleges. The summer between Grace's junior and senior year, she began to get letters from swim coaches. We looked at the colleges that tried to recruit her and that's how we chose. Maybe it wasn't our smartest move since she ended up dropping swim team, but she got into a great college and the swim coach probably helped coax the school to accept her.
Spencer is obsessed with basketball. He plays basketball every day or lifts weights. He is "the big guy" on the team at 6-foot, 4, 190 pounds. I had asked him before if he thought he would play basketball in college.
"Nah," he said. I couldn't tell if he felt afraid that he might not be good enough or if he genuinely didn't want to play. When we went on the college visit, he didn't want to meet the basketball coach.
Basketball must be harder to get into in college, since they only need five guys at a time, unlike swimming, which has teams of 20 or 30.If basketball is out, what do we look for, I wondered. He doesn't know what he wants to major in, so our only criteria is "fun."
Although it is June, high school basketball is going strong. On Friday the team had a tournament at a college outside of Columbus. Spencer took the bus with the rest of the team and reported when they got home that the team won 3 games, lost 1.
"Great," I said.
Later, as we sat together, continuing the two-week long grounding, he said, "Oh, the --- college coach asked about me."
He threw it out like no big deal.
The college coach approached Spencer's high school coach to ask whether Spencer was interested in playing college ball. The coach said yes.
"Even though we've never talked about," Spencer told me.
Of course the coach said yes. He knows Spencer is a gym rat. He can't imagine that a diploma will wipe out that passion.
I felt a relief, a joy, rush through me. Now our college search could be guided to certain universities that wanted Spencer to play ball.
Little details, rules, started to infiltrate my brain. That's right, college coaches can't approach high school students until after July of their junior year. They can talk to the high school coaches though.
Then I started wondering why my children are so competitive about sports, good enough to draw the attention of college coaches. Neither Earl nor I are particularly good at sports, but I was really good at school. I graduated from college magna cum laude. My kids seem to be fairly uninterested in grades. I'm sure they are just as smart as I am (was), but they aren't spurred to work hard for grades.
Let's face it, that can only be my fault. I homeschooled them through their formative years. Because I got good grades, I never pushed the kids, telling them they must get an A in class. And they seem to feel that a B for a little bit of work is better than an A for a lot of work.
At least they're motivated to work hard in sports and maybe that will transfer to their lives if they can find careers they are passionate about.

College Choices

The problem with picking a college, is that there are too many choices today.
When I went to school (long, long ago), I looked at some colleges around Ohio and Kentucky, then chose one. Today, kids get letters from colleges across the country, and they consider them.
Grace is deciding which college to attend this fall. She can go back to the one in north country New York.
Crisp, fall days. Adirondack chairs. Football games. Earl's favorite
Or she could pick a college closer to home with a good reputation that has shady green space and brick walkways.


It has music pavilions and impressive language programs.
Or, a student could be lured by the vacation feel and pick this college that we visited in Florida with its own private beach. Here's Tucker reluctantly dragged along on the tour.
The college also has a place where students can use kayaks and canoes, sailboats, fishing gear. Wouldn't this feel like a permanent vacation?Would my child get any work done?This is the theater set on a lake. The library is also along the waterfront with a wall full of windows.
In two months, Grace will be going off to college again. We just aren't sure where. The thing is, they are all good choices.
Each one will give her something different. Each one will send her life down a different path. There aren't right or wrong paths, just different journeys.

Choices

While Grace was home last weekend, we talked a lot about choices. She hates to make decisions. Even when we're shopping for clothes, she'll say, "I can't choose." Choices aren't right or wrong, I told her, they're just different paths.
As Grace ventures out into the world, she is facing more and more paths. The problem with choosing one path is that the other path gets rejected. Most of the time, once we start on a path, we can't go back and try the other one again to see how that might have turned out.
I tried to illustrate my point by telling Grace that shortly after I moved to Clearwater, Florida for a job with the Tampa Tribune, I was offered a job at the New Orleans Times Picayune. If I had pulled up roots and moved to New Orleans, my life would have been totally different.
I met my husband at the Tampa Tribune. Marrying this particular man led to the paths that we have taken. The fiesty kids, the soujourn in Michigan and then back to Ohio.
Would I have settled in New Orleans? Would I have developed a southern accent and improved my French? Would I have married a man who lived on a bayou?
I don't look back and wish I'd taken another path.

Rather than being helpful, I think this example terrified Grace. Now all of her decisions seemed to be crucial and life changing. The choice she faced was whether to continue swimming. We avoided the word "quitting."
At college, she spent about 22 hours per week swimming. She wasn't loving it. She stressed about the classes and the labs and the grades. She saw her friends only in passing. She went to bed early and rose in the dark to ride her bike to the pool. She longed to go to swing dance class and spend more time at the theater learning to apply make up and hem costumes.
Her path seemed clear. Swimming, although a part of her life for the past eight years, was not going to be her career. When it stopped being fun, when it stopped being the place she socialized, she needed to let it go.
Letting go is hard.
On Monday, hidden in a stairwell in her dorm, she called me sobbing. "What have I done?" she wailed.
She met with the coach and told him, slipping into tears right in his office. When she asked if she might be allowed to return to the team her sophomore, junior or senior year, the coach said, "We'll have to talk about that."
So she swiped at tears as she crossed campus and searched for a private place to cry. It's not easy to find solitude on a college campus.
As the days have passed, her mood has soared and plunged.
"Sometimes, especially at night, I think what have I done? I have to go swim," she confessed in one whispered phone call. She thinks about going to talk to a counselor on campus, but in the morning she feels good about her decision.
As the day wears on and the darkness slowly surrounds her, this path looks unfamiliar and she wonders if she can still run back and try that other path, the one that she was on for a very long time.

The Highs and Lows of Applying for College

This afternoon when we opened the mailbox, a big cream-colored envelope (recycled, of course) awaited us. It was addressed to Grace, but Earl and I tore into it since she was at school. The letter had finally come from her top pick college. She was accepted!
We rejoiced for Grace's acceptance to a school, a really good school where the incoming class hails from places like: Marblehead High School in Massachusetts, Seton Hall Prep School, Miss Edgar's & Ms. Cramp's School in Quebec, Lawrence Academy at Groton, and La Salle Academy in Rhode Island. I'm not sure Grace realizes the odds of a student from a small, public high school in Ohio getting into this elite college. I'm not sure that she realizes her good, but not great, grades were probably not enough to have pulled her into this school. Her freestyle swim stroke may be what twisted the arms of the administrators to allow her to attend. But we'll take it.
During her lunch break, I called and told her the news. She screamed then screamed some more. "I got in!"
The elation we felt for her rose to the ceiling, before falling to the wood floor beneath us when we saw the financial aid offer. The offer was so generous. More than $26,000 each year for Grace's college education. But the tuition is so much more. The college offer included a couple of loans and some work/study opportunity in addition to the $26,000 grant. The bottom line is that our family portion is still going to be more than $19,000 for tuition, room and board each year. Gulp!
It didn't take long before I was on the computer searching for our airline reservations, the ones that were supposed to take us to France next month. We still aren't sure if the tickets are refundable, but if they are, they can go a small way toward paying that chunk of tuition. We realize, now that the numbers are on the table, that we have to put the money toward college rather than a whimsical trip to France.
Even though we may not be going to France, I'm keeping the purse.

And the Winner is...

This summer and fall, we've been traipsing around the Eastern United States trying to help Grace figure out which college she should go to. She has been resistent, insisting that she could just stay home, attend Ohio State or Columbus State, cuddle with her cats, keep her nice settled life.
But we've pushed and some swim coaches have pulled. She started out this summer at the University of Maryland for a national swim meet. She stopped in West Virginia and we made a day trip to a small liberal arts college in Ohio. Then we drove five hours to Indiana before she and Earl zoomed to the Adirondacks.
Mostly, I remember the pools and the schools' non-aggressive team names:
She started with the Cardinals and snuck in a pre-season swim:

We spent an afternoon with the Quakers, my alma mater:

We met the Aces at 5:45 a.m. and they gathered at the end of the practice to sing that Taylor Swift song: "Marry me Juliet we'll never have to be alone..."

Then came the Saints:

This weekend, on her long drive home, she called, and said: "You just know when it's right. This is it."
So she has chosen the most expensive college we looked at and one of the hardest to get into. Only 34% of applicants were accepted last year. Hopefully, the eager swim coach will be able to use his pull to get Grace into the college.
She chose the farthest away. A 10-hour drive. We looked at flights. With layovers and driving time, we could get there in 7 1/2 hours flying.
The real selling point though, is she's excited about going. They have a great biology program, they have tons of languages, and the swim coach says she can participate in theater.
Fingers crossed now. Thank you notes in the mail. Interview out of the way and applicant essays nearly finished, we'll wait to see if she gets her first choice. If not, some of her fallback positions aren't bad either and they're a little closer.