THE SMELL OF FRESH PENCILS

Summer's getting on. Time to start thinking about the annual ritual of the school supplies.

One thing about having lots of kids: you learn some stuff about schools. Sometimes you know more about the way the school operates than the teacher does. This irritates the teachers, by the way.

I have learned a couple of things about school supplies which help cut down on School Supply August Madness, as well as School Supply August Bills:

(1) Forget the snacks and the tissues for a while. Every other kid will be bringing in a box of snacks (they ask for these for kindergarten, here) and a box or two of tissues, as requested on the list. Or the other stuff the teachers request to share as a class--hand sanitizer, maybe. By January, it will all be gone. Just send yours in January instead.

(2) It ain't over until the fat lady sings. Meaning the teacher. You can read those mass-produced Wal-Mart lists, get everything, label it all, pack it all up in the new backpack, and then find out that little Ashley's new teacher, Mrs. Implacable, recommends the larger pack of crayons, or doesn't like certain types of notebooks, or loathes rest mats measuring more than X inches long, or wants your kid's initials written with permanent marker on every single pencil. You find this out at Meet The Teacher, the day before school starts. This happens to us even when we use the lists that are actually mailed out by the school to the students' homes.

And Mrs. Implacable is a brand new teacher and doesn't even know that Wal-Mart puts out those lists, or that the school mails them, since HER mom always bought her school supplies for her. So she thinks you are nuts when you try to ask if the kind of notebook that you already have is okay after all.

And even if there is just one teeny tiny item on the list that Mrs. Implacable gives you at Meet The Teacher that you don't already have, that puts you at the local Wal-Mart at 8:00 pm the night before school starts, rummaging through the depleted shelves, just like all those dreadful parents who can't buy school supplies until the last minute because they frittered away the school supply money on beer and dirty magazines (at least, that's how it makes you feel when you encounter an aisle totally devoid of the right size paper and the popular colors in notebooks).

Over the years, I've developed a system. I grab the stuff on sale ahead of time (the 20 cent packs of crayons and the 10 cent spiral notebooks) and try to get the other stuff I know they'll need that might sell out (pink scissors, cute rulers) and then wait until the night before to finish checking off and packing up, since we'll probably have to do something the night before anyway.

That's the theory, at least. What really happens is that I buy enough school supplies in advance so that the night before won't be a big rush to collect them. Then I put them in Wal-Mart sacks, tie the sacks shut, and hide the sacks so the kids won't use up the crayons and glue before school starts. Then I forget where I hid them. I'll find them in December, when I'm looking for somewhere to hide the Christmas presents.