Their Supplies is My Demand

Every June I survey a sad sight, formerly pristine notebooks lie bindings busted covered in doodles scattered on my dining room table. The binders are joined by remnants of  folders taped together with notices from months passed never removed, dried out pens missing caps, composition notebooks battered with only a handful of pages actually written on signal another school year in the books.  The only thing in the heap mysteriously missing are pencils, nobody seems to know what happens to them over a year.  Certainly not my kids.

It is always at this point, I glance over a crisp new list of needed supplies for the Fall. I flashback to my kids running around stores to find the assigned colors for notebooks, folders, and pens and wonder how difficult it would be to home school. Has anyone tried to find composition notebooks in yellow and orange?   I’m positive I intended to buy the prepared box of supplies this Spring from the PTA in the same pipe dream fashion I intend on going through the current wreckage for salvageable supplies.  In fact, by August, I am pretty sure I’ll find the deadline reminder from the PTA for packaged supplies stuffed in the bottom of my son’s backpack along with a rock, old spoon, one glove and an apple/science experiment.

This year I will be on top of things. I remove my daughter’s volleyball schedule (ended in March) and replace it with the new Supply Lists.  I don’t need the PTA package! By July 1st the summer fun section at the local Target will already have all the latest school supplies, at least until July 31st, when the seasonal section will change over to the new retail holiday “HalloThanksMas”! Renewed by this affirmation, I go ahead and dump the previous year into the trash.

Old habits die hard. Its two weeks before school and class assignments have arrived my visit to the store for supplies has not. “Mom, we need to go get our school supplies!” Right.  But where did I put the list?  Food stained, and slightly wrinkled lists in hand the kids and I are off.  This will be simple, I have been bombarded with back to school ads, I’m up on the prices, they have spiral notebooks for a penny! Why don’t I see spiral notebooks on my kids list? Do the schools not know they’re on sale? What I do see is a TI-84 Plus C graphing calculator. It is not a penny. It is 13,000 pennies  It will however teach my daughter inequality graphing, simultaneous equation solving, conic graphing, and many more things I have no idea myself how to perform. I vaguely wonder if this will help teach her how to bring me change back when I give her a $20 bill as I toss it in the basket. 

When the kids were in early elementary school we used to do scavenger hunts for the supplies on the list in the stores. I would shout out “Glue stick purple application dries clear” and my son and daughter would set off on a mission. Those days are gone, like the four in one colored pen I need now. Now I say I need 5 packages of index cards and my kids come back with an itunes gift card and a hopeful expression.  I know soon the days of supply lists will be gone too. Three ring binders will be replaced with dorm décor as quickly as crayons were replaced by protractors. I wonder if I will miss it? No, at least not right now, while I am doing the required labeling of all the supplies for my children. Like pencils in June, they seem to have mysteriously disappeared.

Happy shopping! Have a great school year.