College Essentials You Won’t Find at Bed, Bath and Beyond

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I posted this on the Huffington Post last week. Readers pointed out some must-brings that I left out. See the bottom of the list.

1. A decent mattress.
Forget the memory foam topper, feather bed and bed bug protector. Face it, no matter how many bedding enhancers you invest in, that saggy, smelly dorm cot will just never be comfortable. Instead, just spring for a brand new mattress, which will cost $89 compared to the $400+ needed to alter the yucky one in the dorm. But remember to get Twin XL. Even though kids manage to fit into normal-sized beds at home, the colleges have conspired with BB & B to scare you about the dire consequences of too-short sheets and force you to purchase all new bedding.

2. A pitch pipe
A capella competition is so fierce these days that your son or daughter will want to practice on the way to class.

3. Unlimited text plan
If your child has been sending 10,000 a day, he or she will now send 20,000. If you have a girl, you will be the lucky recipient. If you have a boy, look forward to one-word responses to your cheery questions, such as Yaaa.

4. Parking Permit
Much cheaper than a car. Can be bartered for free rides from all the students who have brought vehicles to campus but have nowhere to park.

5. Settlers of Catan
College students spend so much time playing this board game (a Germanic combination of Monopoly and Risk, but with sheep) that you will wish they would go back to playing video games.

6. "Find my iPhone" App
The most essential possession of them all. Just be sure that your kids know not to harrass the residents if the phone is located in a crack house.

7. Hot Pink Hair Dye
College students like to show their individuality, by going for the ombre-all-over/look… like everybody else.

8. Fake ID
Although highly fraudulent, it's at the top of most students' checklist, even above the shower caddy.

9. This phone number
To deal with the consequences of #8, the phone number of a local attorney.

10. A subscription to the Wall Street Journal
So students can keep track of all their high school friends who have dropped out of college after receiving seed money from angel investors.

Additions from HuffPo readers:

1. A dress up box – "Have two sons in college and
they always seem to be going to themed parties, so the
equivalent of the dress up box from nursery school would have
been a good thing to take." 

How could I have forgotten this? One of CJ's first purchases was a Sponge Bob costume.

2. Rackraisers (for the daring) – "They appear to be out of stock everyplace I googled, but they raise the beds up to 25" off the ground"

3. A fan's son- "Mosquito repellent if your child is heading east (it was a warm winter there). And as part of my new campaign to make the kid pay for more of his own stuff, I'm renting him out (only on weekends) to sleep in your son or daughter's room — he's a bit messy, but I can guarantee that his mosquito magnetism is so severe, that the annoying pests will never bite your child because they'll be so happy biting mine."

4. Insurance -  "My son dropped his new MacPro off his loft bed in December, as he was packing to come home for break."

Hmm…Maybe the Rackraiser comes with insurance.

Beware of Non-XL Sheets

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GC has registered for classes.  After successfully getting into his 15th, 38th, 65th and 78th choices (because he was in the third registration window for first year students), it is now time to go to Bed, Bath & Beyond to spend a small fortune on items he will destroy, lose or not use at all.

 

The nice folks at BB&B have provided a handy checklist. My favorite section is the new Bed Bug Protection category, which you think college residence halls would have under control for the $55k we're spending. Luckily, I have a kid who believes that less is more – he only wants a Tempurpedic memory foam mattress topper (which costs more than a decent single bed), and in exchange, will do without the shower caddy, dry erase board and clip rings.

There is some logic behind his edited shopping list: He ended up with no classes on Wednesdays or Fridays. And his first class on Mondays is at 4:40pm. So indeed he will be spending a lot of time on that Temporpedic.

 

A particle-scattering hand vaccuum? No way. I've heard that discriminating college kids are obsessed with Dyson vaccuums. So, our shopping adventure is nice and minimal – the Tempurpedic and maybe one set of XL sheets (Yes, we received the warning that many a college student's life has been ruined by getting the wrong size sheet. Tall kids have been sleeping on regular beds at home for years without incident, but suddenly for college someone in the linen industry decided they needed five extra inches.) We've offered to buy two sets, but GC says he will absolutely not change them). And he insists on bringing the ratty towels he brought to camp, the ones we told him to leave there each summer.

A highly edited shopping list – pricey enough to wish BB&B had a layaway policy, while practical enough  to keep his room tidy and free of allergens.

 

 

Strange But True East Coast College Stories

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As four of GC's classmates tour #Vietnam (trending) on their graduation trips, I spent the heat wave gathering blogworthy anecdotes from parents in CT, NY, NJ, MD and DC:

1) GESUNDHEIT – A rising senior Fulbright hopeful from Yale has already taken his GREs. He did very well, of course, but was not allowed to enter the testing center with his travel-sized packet of Tempo Taschentuecher, the more absorbant German version of Kleenex, which he had purchased during his lab research fellowship in Nuremberg. Although the package looks innocent and minimal enough, the proctors probably assumed that the small print was some sort of code for a mathematical formula.

2) MARSHALL-THEMED REFUGEE DINNER – Attended a foodie BBQ at a fabulous home in Bethesda MD with a fascinating group of DC suburbanites who needed to cook all their frozen briskets because of a prolonged power outage. Among the guests were the parents of a University of Chicago student who has just won the prestigious Marshall Scholarship. AND the parents of a Dartmouth student who leaves in September for a semester in the Marshall Islands.

3) NEST WISHES – As I blog, I sit on a brand new next generation 737-800 , headed from BWI to LAS (Not the most direct route home I know, but the best available on changeable Southwest).  My seatmate, who lives in Austin, just confessed to me that his wife couldn't handle living several hours away from their daughter, so the couple has purchased a second home in Virginia, where their child is working on her MBA. A lovely new tradition: A new take on the boomerang syndrome of kids moving home after college – who says parents can't boomerang too?

Addicted to Adderall…Or just to Slacking?

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Here's my very first guest post, written by Liz Willen, esteemed educational blogger, who focuses on the NY public schools.  She has had a very neurotic year: First, the SAT canceled her eleventh grader's SAT score because he happened to be one of the dozens of unlucky kids who ended up in a room with an incompetent proctor at the Packer School in Brooklyn.  Then, Liz read Alan Schwarz's scary NYT piece about rampant use of Adderall as a study drug. But all turned out well:  Her senior was indeed focused, but not on studying for APUSH.

Here's the column:

I read Alan Schwartz's frightening front page New York Times piece on the kind of Sunday night when I could have used a performance boost myself – something I'm sure lots of working parents feel in the waning weekend hours.

Oh, for a rush of adrenaline to finish unwanted chores in full efficiency mode, instead of a lazy desire to watch the Mad Men season finale curled up with a glass of wine.

Yet here it was, nearly midnight, and I still had stories to edit, laundry to fold, school lunches to make and those endless permission slips and end-of-the-year forms to fill out.

Nearby, one of my two high-schoolers was allegedly finishing a paper that should have been done earlier. He was focusing so intently, I wondered for a moment if he'd gotten his hands on one of the stimulants described in The Times piece as being so popular among high school students.

Why wouldn't an overstressed teenager who doesn't regularly take such medication and might not know better want to snort one of these? After all, as the story noted, "Just one pill can jolt them with the energy and focus to push through all-night homework binges and stay awake during exams afterward."

As my son stared at the computer screen and clicked away, I wondered: Had he suddenly gotten a hold of an ADHD drug and morphed into the kind of ambitious, competitive college-bound college junior who loads up on easily obtained stimulants along with Advanced Placement courses and a daunting resume of accomplishments?

Did a crushing pressure to get into the right college fuel a need for illicit performance enhancements that I had not been aware of?

Was it fostered, as Judith Warner noted in a column on the topic, by "an adult-stoked environment of extreme competition and near-hysteria over the perceived super-humanness required to gain entry to a prestigious college?"

Before I could wonder if I had become the kind of mom who pushes her child to extremes and views parenting as a competitive sport, I decided to do a little investigative reporting.

I tiptoed over to my son and glanced at his computer screen, suspicious of finding an unusually brilliant essay, fueled, perhaps, by a drug enhanced ambition and hyperfocus.

At first, I saw what looked like a lot of new vocabulary words (wow, I thought, he's also studying for the SAT!)

This was a bit of a shock, since he has been in a rage since his last scores were cancelled due to problems at the test site and had refused to do more studying.

Still, I saw impressive vocabulary words I had never encountered before, like "Spiritualized,'' and "Chromatics,'' and "Ekstasis.''

Then I noticed the computer was bookmarked at Pitchfork, the website filled with reviews of the latest bands and albums. To the side of the computer, a long list of personal chats from friends filled the screen.

"What's going on?'' I asked. "What about that paper?"

"Oh, it's not due until Wednesday,'' came the reply, followed by a yawn. "I'm going to sleep."

I didn't really care any more when that paper was due, or how much time had just been wasted on Facebook, social media sites and music reviews.

I welcomed that yawn and embraced the slacking attitude. I asked not a question about what other homework might be due, or what the rest of week looked like.

Then I shut down all the computers and said good night.

 

—

Take Two: Form Letter for Empty Nesters

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Through the years, it seems as if every piece of spring correspondence from school has begun with the ultimate cliché:

It's hard to believe that the school year is almost over.  How the children have blossomed.

It's hard to believe that another year has gone by. It's been such a pleasure to watch your little ones learn and grow. 

Another year…and another…And now no more.  Hard to believe.

As we launch into the circumstance of graduation (our school is not so big on pomp), a dad of an only child remarked that he was determined not to let the sappiness get to him.  Instead, he said, embrace what is to come. This is too important a life passage to give in to the cheap emotions and triteness of all the Last Events: The last Soccer Awards Ceremony.  The last Senior Show.  The last Sports Thank You Dinner.  The last Parent Association Thank You Breakfast (with the Last Swag: the last Thank You mug).  The last Pre-Prom Photo Op.

And last Friday, the Last Day of School. As the bell rang at 3pm, the seniors formed a mosh pit on an outdoor stage, grooved to Ain't No Mountain High Enough, and lit up cigars.  A curious tradition at a P.C. school committed to the environment, but epic nonetheless.

Just the way the kids are telling each other in yearbook messages that they wish they had gotten to know each other better, the parent body has suddenly become inseparable.  We spent Saturday night drinking margueritas and toasting the past at an End of an Era party.  We posted photos of hugging, dancing and chatting with people we've seen around since kindergarten but had never spoken to. 

Still to come is Senior Parent Night.  Something to look forward to: That's when we find out how to become lifelong donors.

And today, we received an interesting proposal in the mail:

Dear Parent,

It's hard to believe that your children's elementary, middle school and high school years have vanished in a heartbeat.  Nothing left but archaic 8mm video footage of Halloween parades, rainy field trips, over-the-top birthday parties, squeaky recitals, dimly-lit plays, windy tournaments, controversial laser tag parties and snowy backpacking trips when everyone returned with H1N1.  And all that artwork you meant to frame, now covered with silverfish in a box in the garage.

We bet you're feeling old, ridiculously old.  What will you do with your time now that you won't be volunteering for your kid's school?  There are no Room Moms at college.  Horrifying to imagine that you'll never be a Parent Association Treasurer or a Little League Dad or International Day Pot Luck Chairperson again. 

So, we have a proposal for you: Adopt!  No need to pine over being stuck with your grumpy spouse when you can be playing Pictionary Jr. and roasting kale with an adorable six-year from Somalia, Bolivia or Guam! 

Just think – a chance for a redo, an opportunity not make the same mistakes again, this time with a child who will cheerfully walk the dog, put on shoes every morning and respect the laws about not driving with friends who are under 17.

And best of all, at birth we can guarantee a place for your sweet new baby in one of the top three colleges of your choice (Screw her – this time you'll choose!)  We'll even throw in a gratuitous online PPPSAT course, appropriate for seven and eight year olds.

So instead of sitting around wallowing in self pity, do something good for the world…and for your high school graduate, who needs to start thinking about his or her law school essay.

Sincerely,

The CB Take II Plan

So….the College Board, feeling regretful about recent events at Packer School, must have purchased our name.  Who would have known that their latest mega screw up could end up not only curing the doldrums of empty nesting, but also benefit the orphans of Somalia?