A little bragging, a little relief

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Okay, the middle kid has been stressing out for a week now, leading up to her GRE today. She’s been studying. She’s been taking practice tests. She’s been reading up on Geometry. She actually started this whole process in a lighter way back in May, but this past week has been much more intense.

So today, she’s ready to go. I tell her she’ll be fine. Her father has been telling her she’ll be fine. She’s still looking pretty worried. I’m trying to tell her everything will be okay, and she’s always done well on these tests, and she’ll do better than she thinks. She’s smart, she’ll be fine. And she starts out the door without her sweatshirt.

Half an hour later, the phone rings. “Mom, I can’t find the place.” I look it up, tell her which direction to go, she says she still can’t see it, I tell her to call them. “Okay, that sounds good. Bye.”

Wait, wait, wait. Hope she found it and she’s not sitting somewhere crying in the car.

Four hours later. Phone rings. “Mom?” I can’t read the voice, so I say, “How did it go?” hoping the next thing won’t be tears. “On the verbal I got 660, and on the math I got 610.”

Tomorrow I’ll get her a Slurpee. It’s what we always did for the kids when they got a good report card.

2

Mad applause for the middle kid!

So, what’s appearing on her horizon now?

3

They grade them on the spot nowadays?

4

It’s a computer test, so it also reacts to the questions you get right or wrong and adjust the difficulty. She won’t have her writing score for a while, but at least she knows it wasn’t a dismal failure. I’ve seriously never seen her so worried about something like this.

5

Grad school next year, but she hasn’t quite decided where. She’s leaning toward Arizona. She didn’t originally intend to take the year out between undergrad and grad school, but she didn’t decide to graduate this year until it was too late to apply. She was doing a double major in history and sociology, but dropped the sociology to a minor and took one last class this summer. So she walked the stage in May and came home last month. And last week she celebrated her big birthday - 21 now!

In the meantime, she’s leaving Saturday for England to do two weeks of archeology field school, and then she’ll be working as a nanny for a while to make ends meet and put some money away.

Thanks for the applause.