Four nights
The letter came after the short bus came to pick up the boys for the last time, but before I took the girls to school. At first it was "too late", but by the time I got back it was "open for discussion". We completed the move-out and exit cleaning, picked up the boys and the girls (four schools in 40 minutes), then went out to camp to organize, and at 7:30pm were back at the storage for final pickup of pillows and blankets.
We crossed the Mississippi heading east at 8:30pm, Monday, overnighting just north of the Wis Dells. Tuesday the kids got in a half-hour of pool time after breakfast, then we shopped for presentable or forgotten clothes at the outlets at the Dells and continued east, clearing the Loop at 3pm and overnighting at Erie. Wednesday we continued east, entering the familiar Appalachian East and making Ithaca shortly before 3pm, and MB's scheduled meeting with Cornell Law's Admit Dean. The kids and I cruised the campus, then the town, stopping at the co-op for gluten-free-foods exploration. An evening of discussion, the pros, the cons, what we know (Minneapolis) and what we don't know (Ithaca), and the decision to commit the $700 seat deposit, in addition to the $700 seat deposit already paid to Minnesota Law. Thursday a follow-up meeting for MB while the kids and I cruised more of the town and environs, and at 3pm, 24 hours after arriving in Ithaca, we reverse our route, raising Lake Erie before sundown and overnighting near Toledo. Friday MB withdrew from Minnesota Law. We cleared the Loop at 3pm and got back to camp, with the kids and the adults in bed before midnight.
There were other decision elements. If not Cornell, then a detour on the return path to Pittsburgh to pull half of our Maine household, stored since the Panasas debacle the Winter of 2005/6, to Minneapolis. Minneapolis schools all use Connected Math, which is so bad that I had to consider work-arounds, from the classroom-hour to the school. The sole exception to this profound error at the district-level being the a Chinese Immersion charter school the first Chinese immersion school in the Midwest and the first Chinese immersion charter public school in the U.S., which uses Singapore Math, which the kids have been using for three years.
The kids will have the last two days of the school year in each of their four schools, then we'll travel east, via the Upper Peninsula, where we summered in 2005, and fetch up in Ithaca, to start again the tasks of insertion -- renting a residence, enrolling the girls in regular ed, enrolling the boys in special ed, and settling in.
MB is going to Cornell Law, as a recruited Indian, for her leadership qualities, in which this blog is a part, as was her run for the 116th district (Portand, West) of the Maine Legislature, which Wampum's readers so generously supported, and with much less three-year aggregated debt than we imagined was our lot in life.