School supplies

This afternoon I decided I could no longer delay the inevitable and headed over to Target to purchase school supplies. I armed myself with the lists of "suggested" items our schools have so kindly published, and a pen for crossing out the items after I put them in the cart. Incidentally, I think "suggested" is a synonym for mandated.

Two hours and about $110 later, I headed home with 7 plastic bags full of glue bottles, glue sticks, folders, notebooks, pencils, pens, binders, rulers, pencil boxes, pencil bags, looseleaf paper, scissors, watercolors, washable markers, dry erase markers, colored pencils, crayons, pencil sharpeners, erasers, kleenex boxes, wipes (six canisters just for kindergarten!), and a non-perishable snack for 20 kids. And this is just the stuff from the lists. I still have to go to Office Max for the clear plastic protractor and the yellow three-ring binder, as color-coded notebooks, folders and binders are required at almost every grade level for the different subjects. At the checkout in Target I actually felt sorry for the cashier. The people standing behind me, an older couple, couldn't stop commenting on how many items I had. "How many children do you have?" "How many glue bottles could you possibly need?" (Answer: kindergarten requires four, plus two glue sticks, and second grade needs one bottle and two sticks).

NOW I expect I'll spend another two hours sorting through all the bags and figuring out who gets what, then labeling in permanent marker. Caleb will label his own supplies, and most of Chase's don't need to be labeled because the kindergarten classrooms operate under the communal property law. So that just leaves Maren's various paraphernalia needing a name afixed. Come meet the teacher night, we'll haul all the supplies to the respective classrooms (or, in Caleb's case, his locker). I guess this is all much more efficient for the teachers than in the olden days, when we just bought what we thought was needed and tucked it away in our school bags to bring on the first day of school. Kids nowadays have to hit the ground running... armed with all their "suggested"color-coded supplies.

Busy, busy, busy...

... playing Hot Dog Bush at www.addictinggames.com/hotdogbush.html Who has time to blog when there are so many hungry customers?