SimplyMom: Back To School Shopping

Posted by Mary

Back when I was going to school, my parents had a pretty easy time of getting us ready. My mom – a heavy-duty believer in “one stop shopping” - would take the four of us to Woolworth’s. There we were allowed to choose a schoolbag. (Yes, this was in the days before backpacks. No, I didn’t attend classes in a one-room schoolhouse.)

We were also permitted to select a new Aladdin lunchbox (the kind with glass inside the thermos, the kind that was always broken sometime before Halloween) and a single small notebook. My mom would instruct us to ask our teachers what other supplies were necessary, then write down the list in the notebook. Thus supplied, we were ready for our first day of school.

Teachers these days make things easier – and harder. By August, I had received four different “must have” supply lists in the mail. (In fact, one of my sons brought his list home way back in June. Now there’s a teacher that thinks ahead!) Some of the items on the list were standard – pencils, pens, highlighters, erasers. Others presented us with the challenge of tracking down just the “right” item for classroom success. (Tell your kids it’s an Educational Scavenger Hunt.)

So we spent the last month of summer vacation searching out the more elusive items on the list. (And I do have to give credit to the board of education on this point – just when my kids were getting bored of the usual summer activities, they had this entirely new sport to play. I kinda think of it as our own version of the X Games, with credit cards.)

We found binders and glue sticks, wide-ruled loose leaf and classic color markers. It took a bit of digging, but we were even able to find the very last box of 16 crayons (because it’s apparently an academic no-no to overload your third grader with 24 crayons – even though the box of 24 was on sale for a quarter and the box of 16 went for $1.19. I suspect somebody’s getting a kickback from Crayola on this scam).

But, even though we put in an Olympic effort, we couldn’t find one item – the two-pocket, three-pronged folder. Oh, sure, I found folders – folders in blue, green, yellow, red, pink and white. I even found designer folders in turquoise and teal. Unfortunately, the supply list called for an orange folder.

We did an exhaustive search, looking through aisles of protractors and end-caps of calculators, but we never did come up with the orange folder. “Maybe we can buy the white one, and color it orange?” I suggested, although knowing my luck, orange wouldn’t be included in the box of 16 crayons.

I’m not sure if the supply list was a challenge, or some weird form of parental hazing. I do know, however, that I’m the one person in the house who slept well the night before school starts. Maybe it was because all that shopping was exhausting. Or it could be I’m just resting up. How many shopping days until Christmas?

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SimplyMom: Back To School Shopping

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