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January 17 - Hindsight is 20/20 Journaling Challenge

Must have at least 200 words: 285 words (words added to gallery layout description)
2. Must include the phrase "Hindsight is 20/20" is on the top line
3. Must include Lilypad products: Racheal Jefferies Those Wings kit used
4. Photos optional: Stock photo added to protect privacy

 
On buying a new house with a garden. In hindsight, not the best of ideas: I suck at gardening. Thankfully the house is awesome

 
journaling is copied in with layout credits and in my challenge thread. Word count is 326 :)
 
Okay, I have 343 words.


Text reads:
Back before Mei's senior year, the "plan" was for her to live at home and attend community college. Sometime that summer of 2018, she decided that she wanted to experience living in a dorm. I knew that but she had not told her dad. We were in Lansing, MI the weekend of my sister's wedding. I was driving and somehow James and Mei got on the topic of where she was attending college. He made some remark about her "always" being at home and she took it as him not thinking she could handle the academics of a 4-yr college.

So she started crying. She explained she wanted to move away to college and live in a dorm. Then James started crying because he was not prepared for the though of his baby girl leaving home. Meanwhile, I am driving in a new area and I am "lost". After more talking, James was able to accept the idea of her going off to college.

Fast forward to the fall of 2018. She and James attended a presentation on colleges and she come home excited about attending Meredith College. She applied to Meredith College in Raleigh and to Johnson and Wales University in Charlotte. She was not excited about being in Charlotte as that was too far away from home, but they had a good program. What to do? They made the decision for her: she was not accepted at Johnson and Wales, but she was accepted at Meredith. This was a great! She would still be "away" living in the dorm, but only 30 minutes away from home. Perfect for us to see her on weekends.

And now, she has finished her first semester at Meredith. She got all A's and one B. She loves living in the dorm and all the activities at the college. And James? He calls it the "Meredith Cult". She comes home just about every other weekend and so he is happy.

So that awful day of crying has turned into a wonderful experience for all of us.
 
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full
 
Ok, take two:

I'm so cross with myself I can't even retype the nifty little intro I had for this, so I'll just drop the corrected page in here and go fix dinner.

Word count is now 251

 
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This was so fun! I decided to scan some old sports photos and tell a not-too-serious story. Thanks for the challenge! I need to journal more...
 
Word count: 501 Thanks for the fun challenge!


We live in a school district that offers an honors program for upper elementary students beginning in 3rd grade. Traditionally that program has been offered at magnet schools, with about 5 neighborhood schools feeding into the same magnet school. When Jason was in second grade, the school told us he’d been accepted into the honors program and we had the choice to send him or not. In reality, there wasn’t much of a choice to make. If all of the top students were going, he’d be bored if he stayed behind and was taught at a slower pace. He never liked XXXXX School as much as our neighborhood school, but he got a good education there and we didn’t regret our choice.

Now fast forward five years, to Lauren’s second grade year. She, too, was accepted into the honors program. But over time there has been a trend toward local elementary schools offering their own classes; XXXXX School is not the given it once was. We knew the principal at our elementary school was trying to get an honors class going there, but we’d been hearing that for years without it actually happening. After a lot of thought, we decided that Lauren should transfer to XXXXX School for the honors program.

From the start of Lauren’s third grade year it was apparent that the issues we’d noticed during Jason’s years there had gotten much worse. The higher-than-desired turnover that had existed for years had turned into an inability to hire or retain good teachers. Rumor said that the principal was the cause; he didn’t support the honors program. By the end of September several of the students who had gone to XXXXX School with Lauren returned to our neighborhood school.

Work started in earnest to get the honors program going at the neighborhood school as quickly as possible, hopefully in time for the next school year. They’d originally planned to begin with just third grade then expand each year, but the demand was so high among students from Lauren’s year that they decided to begin with both third and fourth grades to accommodate her class as well. By spring we knew for sure that the neighborhood school had received county approval to begin their honors program the next school year.

Lauren had said from Day 1 that if there was a choice she was going back, so in May we filed the paperwork for Lauren to transfer back to our neighborhood school for fourth grade. Almost all of the students who’d begun third grade at XXXXX were back at YYYYY for fourth. If we’d known how this would go and how many of Lauren’s academic peers were going to end up back at our neighborhood school during third grade, we never would have sent her to XXXXX for the year. Hindsight is 20/20, but at least she was able to return to the school we all loved for the rest of her elementary school career.
 
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