Verbatim

Steph is a junior at Wheelock and still loving her Early Childhood Education program. Some of you may have seen a news item that Wheelock is (likely) going to become part of Boston University! So Steph would graduate from BU's new Wheelock College of Education and Human Development. Presumably she would have use of all BU's facilities, too, which would be great since Wheelock is pretty tiny and BU is huge! We haven't heard the proposed timeline, but I imagine it would be sooner rather than later. They did say that Wheelock's tuition would be honored, which is a big deal because it is about two-thirds of BU's! The big question on my mind is whether they'll honor Wheelock's 5-year bachelor's/master's program, which is what Steph has been planning to do all along. We shall see…. 

Julie is a sophomore in high school, but in the fall she is all volleyball, all the time. She is a "swing player," which means that she plays in both varsity and JV games—a pretty big deal for a sophomore! It makes for very long game days because she has to be ready to play during every set of both games, but she loves it. She always practices with varsity, which Andy maintains is where all the learning and progress really happens. She did a bunch of clinics in the spring and summer, and I guess they really paid off! 

Pete is a freshman at Colby College, but he is doing Colby's "Global Entry Semester" program in Spain at the University of Salamanca! He will rejoin the rest of the school in Waterville, Maine, in January (along with the kids doing the same program in Dijon, France). By pure coincidence, Andy's sister spent two whole summers at the University of Salamanca back in the day, and she says it has always been her "happy place." It's a nice college town, with international students from all over there for the intensive language program. But the 28 kids on his program also have use of the Colby Center there to meet and hang out, and they get taken on Colby-only excursions every other weekend—Toledo, Segovia, Avila, Madrid, Sevilla, Malaga, Granada, Cordoba are just a few of the places they'll visit! He lives in an apartment with about 10 other international students, from France, Italy, Germany, Romania, Netherlands, you name it. Their host mom, Ana, cooks three meals a day for them, and they eat together and try to communicate in their broken Spanish! Fun. He has language classes as well as culture/history classes. So far it's all going great and it sounds as though he's really taking advantage of all he can. He will need to start training for track too, since the winter season will have already started when he gets back to campus in January. (The coach had told him he wouldn't need to try out, so at least he doesn't have to worry about that!) Oh … and Andy and I are going to visit him during his mid-semester break at the end of October! We are thinking of taking him to Barcelona—that isn't one of his excursions, and it's also the one place Andy and I regret most that we didn't get to on our trip to Spain many years ago. ¡Vámonos!