We returned home safely from Belize a few days ago.  We're enjoying our bug-free, snake-free accomodations, but all of us do miss the jungle and the all-night chants of the howler monkeys.

While on vacation CJ was very uncooperative about finding out his friends' college results.  He did let us know that Mr. 2400 had been accepted to Stanford and that CF (Clippers Fan) would be headed to Cornell, but stubbornly refused to even peruse any of his friends' Facebook pages to find out where they would and would not be going. 

I,the Neurotic Parent, faced obstacles in my own investigation.  I tried to contact HOMFTE (Highly Organized Mom of Future Top Engineer), who had been maintaining a spreadsheet of the results of kids in CJ's grade, but she was on the Nile celebrating her son's acceptance to Johns Hopkins.  I did reach the MFFMD (Mom of Future Famous MD), who let me know that her son had been accepted to Williams (after being deferred), plus Dartmouth, Wesleyan, Tufts, Berkeley and UCLA.  And I managed to get news about the students featured in my Yale or No Yale post (more about this tomorrow).  But there was hardly any other substantiated news about CJ's classmates, teammates and former pre-school buddies.

I was not alone in my uninfomed status.  Other parents emailed, reporting that their boys "knew nothing" and were doing little to get updates about their friends.  CJ's high school's Naviance site, which reports college statistics, showed that students in his class had been accepted to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Penn, Brown, Dartmouth, Columbia, Stanford, MIT, Duke, Northwestern, Julliard and Williams, but on closer inspection, it seemed that many of these decisions were old news (ED and EA) or might have reflected multiple positive results for the same students.

After 24 hours at home, many calls from parents, (including several from other schools) and continued silence from CJ, the Neurotic Parent just HAD to know.  As another Mom said, not finding out the results after all this was like missing the last episode of a mini-series. 

So I broke down and called a Girl in CJ's class.  Within minutes I had an accurate, comprehensive list of acceptances, denials and waitlist hopefuls, plus details about who was deciding between two or three schools. 

As I theorized, a few of the top spots went to the same lucky/talented students.  A girl who had gotten into Yale EA had been admitted to Princeton.  And another girl received offers from both Princeton AND Harvard.  Shockingly, although CJ attends a tiny school and has taken many of the most challenging classes, I had never even heard of one of these girls and barely knew who the other was…Most unsatisfying – sort of like new actors showing up as stars in the last episode of a mini-series.