My college junior is supposed to be going to Budapest for the semester in mid-January. I don't know whether to hope for it to be canceled or not (and I'm a little surprised it hasn't been yet). And then my high school junior has a bunch of in-person auditions for music schools in January and February, and I'm nervous they'll all end up being virtual (which wouldn't be the end of the world, but would be a big bummer; he already didn't get to do in person visits/sample lessons last year).

He passed the prescreen at Oberlin! Phew! I know it's dangerous to have a dream school at this point, but he totally does, and Oberlin's it. So I'm glad we don't have to get through Christmas with a kid who just had his dreams crushed 🙂 . Now we have a January Ohio roadtrip in our future for the final audition. I'm very interested to see if Oberlin holds up in person to what he's built up in his head; he saw it in person 3 years ago when we visited with his older brother, and then he had a sample lesson with the clarinet prof over a year ago now.

As a patient, I would absolutely go out of my way to go to a hospital or other healthcare facility that requires vaccines over one that doesn't. I can't imagine there aren't plenty of healthcare workers who feel the same way about where they work and, particularly in this job market, will choose an employer that values science and public health over one that doesn't.

That part was agony with my oldest! He didn't deposit until April 30, if I remember right. It makes sense--it's a very big decision--but I still kind of wanted to tell him to just pick one out of a hat and be done with it 😂

congratulations to him!!

oh! And I ordered this for my almost 9 year old who's listened to all the Little House audiobooks over the past couple of years: a tin cup with the same presents Laura and Mary got in Little House on the Prairie: https://www.ingallshomestead.com/christmas/lauras-tin-cup-1

https://www.amazon.com/Grubkeepers-Penko-Ultrasaurus-Accessory-Tacosaurus/dp/B07Q3Z5RJL/?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_w=IlqAU&pf_rd_p=29505bbf-38bd-47ef-8224-a5dd0cda2bae&pf_rd_r=VJQFQYXPM320QQ7J3FKR&pd_rd_r=829d70ab-eed9-4751-b357-cb84b64d530f&pd_rd_wg=CDZ8q&ref_=pd_gw_ci_mcx_mr_hp_atf_m

congrats to him! this is last year's thread, though--it got bumped up today when matrips asked about U of Alabama 🙂

We have the ninja foodi xl (so it's an multi-function air fryer oven--toasts, broils, bakes, etc) and we rarely use our regular oven anymore even with a family of 6. We could get by indefinitely if our oven stopped working. Ours actually does claim it will cook a small turkey even, although we haven't tried that 🙂

Yes, this. I'm also tired of hearing about the 1% of nurses at some hospital or other who are going to quit over vaccine requirements, with no thought given at all to how many might quit over being denied a safe work environment if their co-workers AREN'T vaccinated. Or how many people won't go into health care or education or whatever at all now that they see how little regard many people give to the lives or health of people in those fields.

My 8 year old just has a cheapie kindle fire; he uses it for games and videos, mostly just on road trips (we do a lot of road trips). His has been hanging in there for awhile (2 or maybe 3 years?) but I ordered him another one for Christmas because his old one has gotten really slow.

Same. the two in our family who get seasick are the ones who can't read in the car without very quickly feeling sick. I get very nervous on boats in rough water, but don't feel the least bit queasy.

yeah, it would also have been heavenly not to have had to discover that a lot of my neighbors, family members, etc. are capable of tolerating a seemingly limitless number of preventable deaths rather than make any personal sacrifices.

My husband has an aunt who lives across the country and who we haven't seen in many years (and, honestly, might never see again. I've only met her once that I can remember in the 25 years we've been together. She and my MIL are not close and almost never talk to each other either. There's no bad blood or anything; they're just not close). She always sends my kids presents; it used to be clothes, and I think she kind of enjoyed picking out baby/little kid clothes because she doesn't have kids of her own, but now it's usually Amazon gift cards. We appreciate it and they always send a thank you note, but....really, they/we would not be at all hurt if she stopped and I'd be a little relieved. It feels awkward to me that we get gifts from someone we pretty much never interact with otherwise.

We've encountered the fill out this form instead of submitting a transcript thing at a couple of public colleges lately; it's annoying, but it hasn't been too complicated in our case (they didn't require number grades; that would have been aggravating). I think it's fairly common for big public schools to want you to do something like that (or to want to see a lot of extra test scores for homeschoolers) so that everything's very standardized and they can see at a glance how your student compares. Small privates, on the other hand, if they have extra requirements for homeschoolers, tend to want sort of the opposite--instead of condensing all the information to numbers and test scores, they're more likely to ask for lengthy course descriptions, extra essays, or portfolios. If I got to pick I'd rather wrestle with an extra form...sadly my kid's applying to a big enough range of schools that we get to do some of each.

Lawrence University (Conservatory)

Subject tests going away pretty much made me cross our state flagship off my 10th grader's potential colleges list. He now has no way to "verify" the biology he did in 9th grade other than taking AP bio senior year or DE class (which he would HATE). If he really wanted to go there we'd figure it out, but since I don't think it's the best fit for him anyway, it was easy to decide to stop jumping through their hoops.

He got into Lawrence! With a really nice music scholarship (full financial aid package coming later)....yay! he's going to college SOMEWHERE!

He finally submitted his Oberlin prescreen, after much fretting. I have no idea if the prescreen is more a way to filter out the truly hopeless or if it's a very competitive first round audition. I remember that a couple of years ago when we did a conservatory tour, Oberlin wasn't yet prescreening for clarinet, and now they are...but I don't know what to make of that. Anyway, it's in and now he waits! In the meantime, he still has to submit his Blair/Vanderbilt prescreen and he has an audition at his in-state school this Friday. He's supposed to hear back from Oberlin about the prescreen and from Lawrence about early action mid-December, so that will affect the holiday mood around here one way or the other.

yikes! way to make a stressful process even more stressful!

yes, if it works with the prompt, it would be fine.

I almost made a joke about TikTok acceptance notices, but I decided I'd probably fumble it badly and sound exceptionally old 🙂

First audition is finished! This got a little complicated: he was supposed to fly to Wisconsin this weekend for the audition, but then he got a call that the main clarinet professor is in the hospital and wouldn't be able to do auditions, but that they have a new second clarinet teacher that he could audition with over zoom. So while we were trying to decide if he'd still fly up there to see the campus and do the online audition from there I realized that I somehow booked the plane tickets for the wrong day!! I have no idea how that happened, but we took it as a sign to stay home, audition from home online, cancel the flight, and use the delta credit to visit in the spring (assuming he gets in and the school is still in contention). ANYWAY, he thinks the audition went well. He liked clarinet teacher #2 and says the guy told him that he's "very, very good." Which is what you want to hear. This is early action, so he should hear back by mid-December.

That's what colleges get for still sending e-mails when kids that age never check e-mail 😂

I just checked, and my state is one of the only ones not reporting vaccination data by county on the NYT tracker. So no idea locally what rates are like; I'm in a well-educated suburban area, so I imagine higher here than in the state as a whole. Our county just got rid of the mask mandate for schools a few days before kids were eligible for their first shots. Sure--makes sense. Now, a week and a half later, word is the local elementary school has more than a dozen cases in the 5th grade and two classrooms have had to go virtual (as far as I can tell this is the first week all year this school has had more than 3 cases in the entire school at one time). So that's how things are going here. Community numbers are relatively low again for now (just went under 100/100,000 14 day rate), which means I don't see nearly as many masks in stores as I did a month or two ago (I'd guess it's at around 25% now).