Flying the Nest ...

So Paige and Daniel went back to school recently -- Daniel last Monday, and Paige yesterday. They had both come home for the Martin Luther King Jr. Day weekend. I miss them both😢

Emma and I drove up to Golden with Daniel on Monday, and we did our old one-two with a stop at Sweet Tomatoes in Lone Tree followed by a trip to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. Emma was keen to see the Ultimate Dinosaurs exhibit, which was on its last day. From there it was a less than 20-minute drive via I-70 over to Golden. Emma loved Daniel's spacious apartment at the Colorado School of Mines and wishes Grinnell College had something similar.

Paige drove up yesterday. Before she left, she started her application to the University of Northern Colorado honors program. She has a 4.0 GPA and , between community college and university, has over 200 credit hours now. She only needs 120 to graduate, although she still needs to fill a couple of distribution requirements. She will apparently be able to graduate at the end of this year, but she might want to stay for the spring semester of 2019 in order to tie up some loose ends and perhaps get a second major. As part of upper division honors, she would need to complete a creative or research project. She is thinking about composing a musical illustration of an Irish myth.

Laura is thinking about transferring to a four-year, perhaps CU Boulder, CSU Fort Collins, or Earlham College in Indiana. The first two are big (30,000+ students) public research universities in the Rocky Mountain Foothills; Earlham is a tiny liberal arts college. Both Boulder and Fort Collins are beautiful cities that rank, according to National Geographic, in the top 10 happiest cities in the nation (Boulder at #1; Fort Collins at #4). Laura has many ideas about what to study and is currently leaning toward dietetics. If she goes that route, CSU would probably be the better choice for her.

And then Emma will be off to Grinnell in the fall. Just three months from now, she will become a  legal adult, or "a dolt" as my kids would say when they were little. All four kids will then be "dolts".

We have two commencements coming up:

1) Daniel's commencement for his undergraduate degree in engineering physics will take place on May 11, starting at 9am, at the School of Mines in Golden.

2) Emma's high school commencement will take place on May 19 at noon at the Denver Botanic Gardens