Aahhhh. Let's all give a sigh of relief that School is upon us once again.
Okay, I admit it, I really admire those people who say things like, "I love spending time with my children. I choose to homeschool because I can't imagine turning my kids over to someone else all day. I missed them when they were in school. It's so much better now that we spend every day together."
Yeah, I admire those people, I do. I am not one of them, though. Yet another pre-parenthood assumption bites the dust.
So, today is Saturday, and school starts Monday, for everyone except Tillie, whose college starts next Wednesday. This year, we have kids in five different schools if you count the colleges: two in elementary, one starting middle school, one in high school, one starting college, and one going into her third year of a different college.
Here's the thing that pleases me this year, about which I had one of those "Hey, Maybe I Did Something Right" moments: Two years ago, we moved to the house we are in now. One motivator in moving was to get closer to the part of town we seemed to need to go to the most, but it was all kind of a vague notion, something that might help or might not--because, when you have kids, things can be very different from year to year. When Alan finished high school, would he want to go to the university within walking distance of the new house, or would he quit his senior year and sign on as an apprentice vacuum-cleaner salesman in South Dropout, Arkansas? You never know.
So, here's the good thing: This year, we have kids in five different schools (including two colleges, one private and one a state university) and all five schools AND my work are within two and a half miles of our house. Fred's work is only four miles from our house. And in a moment of possible precognition, we did this just BEFORE gas prices skyrocketed. Ha.
Now, if only I could plan this well for school supplies. I posted about school supplies last year, too. It seems to be on my mind a lot in August.
I think that I have planned well enough that we will avoid roaming the depleted school-supply aisle at Wal-Mart at nine p.m. the night before the first day of school, and that's about all I hope for any more.
When the crayons and colored pencils went on sale at Wal-Mart (which they do every July) for ridiculously low prices (like ten cents a box), I bought them. And then I bought more, a couple more times, so we'd be sure to have some when it came time to pack those backpacks.
Could I find any of them today? Ha. No. I went to the local grocery store and bought crayons at something like $2.50 a box, because the crayon monster has apparently, as he does every year, eaten all the new boxes of crayons.
I had to buy colored pencils and notebooks and pencil boxes at grocery store prices, too, because ditto. Lillie says that she had a pencil box, and that she even put her colored pencils into it, but it is nowhere to be found (possibly it contains several boxes of crayons, too?). (Yes, Wal-Mart was open today. We have a policy of never entering a Wal-Mart on a Saturday, because they are packed with people, and also I was trying to prevent the experience of past years, where we went to Wal-Mart right before school started and everyone else had already bought everything, and the employees acted like they'd never even heard of a Composition Book, which the grocery store, today, just happened to have. So I got the stuff there.)
I know part of the problem is me. I hide the stuff, in an effort to prevent just this problem of not being able to find it right before school starts. I don't want the kids to use the school supplies, or lose them. So I hide school supplies, Christmas presents, Halloween costumes, as well as those highly desirable items that get used up immediately if anyone finds them (like Scotch tape--go figure). It's just that about half the time, I can't remember where I hid whatever it was once it's time to find it.
I now have everything on the school-supply lists, except for one yellow spiral notebook. There weren't any. I have a theory about this. I think that the spiral-notebook people don't ship yellow spiral notebooks to this part of the country, and the teacher knows that, and she is unhappy in her job, and she gets her jollies by picturing parents on their knees at the store, rummaging through piles of spiral notebooks, fruitlessly searching for yellow.
I draw the line at the buying the Kleenex and hand sanitizer that the schools always ask for. I just plain refuse. They'll have tons of the stuff now and will run out in January, just like every year. I'll send ours in January.
I've bought five thousand boxes of crayons this summer to get ready for Monday. It's too much to ask me to spring for hand sanitizer too, that's all I'm saying.
