Fool Supplies

I blew it this year. I'm not sure what happened, but somehow I failed. Don't get me wrong, I fail a lot. Just usually not so blatantly.

Sitting on my dining room buffet for over a month are the following items: 1 set of watercolor paints, 2 boxes of gallon size Ziploc bags, 1 extra large bottle of hand sanitizer, and 6 black dry erase markers. Okay, forget the dry erase markers, they don't count. Alright, maybe they count half-way, but it really wasn't my fault I swear!

All I had to do was look at the list of supplies each child needed and buy them. Of course, post-purchase the task continues. Each supply must be properly labeled and delivered to the school on the proper day. I have learned that not bringing the supplies on the day that the teacher expects them can be a problem. You want to watch what'll happen to your kids when they get caught with a cough drop in their book bag? (No tolerance policy on medication remember?!?) Drop by your child's classroom with a bag full of supplies to give to an unprepared teacher. It will send her head spinning right off her shoulders and into the solar system mobile hanging from the ceiling. Seriously! I've seen it happen. Witnessing this will not bode well for the rest of the year.

We went to WalMart (due to the fact that we are in Leavenworth, KS and our only option is WalMart) the week before school started. The schools on Ft. Leavenworth started August 10th while Leavenworth's Schools started September 7th. That alone seemed to give us an advantage. No one is school supply shopping a month before school starts, are they? Why yes, yes they are! And the Leavenworth WalMart was hopping when we went. Oh joy!

What you need to understand is that there was a time when I had only one or two children to buy supplies for. I was that Mom happily walking up and down the aisles with two young girls picking out pink pencil cases and Disney colored pencils. I don't know that I considered it "fun," but I'm not sure that the word "torture" would have come to mind either.

This year, given the option, I think I would've liked to give water boarding a shot. I think it would've been far less painful than "Back To School Shopping." If you read my last post I did talk about my love for the Staples commercial where the parents ride around on the shopping cart piling things in while the kids drag their feet behind. It's the subject matter I love! (That's obvious right?)

I am not excited to take any child to any store...unless of course I find a Babies R Us that takes returns, of the human kind. Entering a store with a child in tow, should give you an automatic 10% off. The more kids you have, the higher the discount. Think about it. I do not typically enter any store with my kids unless I have a specific purpose for being there. Give me a discount and it makes it even easier to decide what I want and how many I can afford. The sooner I leave, the sooner the associates can stop following us around to clean up after the path of Hurricane Carlton. Anyway, just a thought.

So there we are in WalMart with 5 kids and a spread sheet that tells me how many of each item I need for what classroom. I had highlighted the appropriate columns and thought I had fair idea of what I needed to get. But when we started down the aisles my mind went blank. I couldn't remember if we needed the folders with pockets WITH the little insert thing-ys or without them. I pulled the cart to the side of the aisle to study my list. The boys were wrestling in the basket of the cart, the girls were claiming that every notebook on the shelf was too ugly to possibly buy and Charlie's looking longingly toward electronics. I sigh, give him the cart with the boys and send them on their way. So I am down one adult, but also down two boys which, because they are boys, is roughly equal to more than half of my kids.

The girls have no focus. The are asking for rubber cement, a neon green calculator and a radio that fits in a school locker. None of these things are on the list mind you. Do they really think I'm that dumb? I do the best I can with the minimal help I'm receiving. I give up after buying about 1/2 of what we need and we go to find the boys. (All 3 of them) They are in the toy section fighting with light sabres. Nice! I kept my cool until I saw the girls kicking up their feet in order to "fling" their flip-flops down the aisle. When Josie's nasty, end of summer, slab of cork flew sideways and ended up two aisles over, I briefly wondered whether people ever get kicked out of WalMart as I herded them out of the store. (Charlie got to stay behind and pay).

These dreaded lists get longer every year. When I was in school, they hadn't yet invented the almighty glue stick. One bottle of liquid Elmer's was good enough. It was good enough for any craft project, it was good enough to puddle on your desk and peel off when it dried, and it was good enough for some kid named Eric to drizzle on his chair and sit down when my Kindergarten teacher told him to "glue himself to his seat." (And that was good for about a 1/2 hour of chaos in our classroom). But now, good ol' Elmer's is doing double duty. Not only do I have to buy several glue sticks for each kid (this year's total was 16), but they also want a bottle of the original! Keep in mind that the glue sticks must be of the white variety, not the purple which turns clear or the glitter kind and the liquid glue must be white, not blue. I think it's a white conspiracy if you ask me. (Thinking about it, I haven't seen one reference to The Wiz since I moved to Kansas).

Americans have also become progressively more germ-o-phobic in the last several years. I now have to send in anti-bacterial wipes AND a gallon size jug of anti-bacterial gel for each child. I guess it's good. I've never been one for being to stressed about germs. You know the mom whose kid drops their pacifier in the grocery store parking lot and then you see her suck the pacifier off, spit over her shoulder, and plug the kid up again? You do know her, you really do! IT'S ME!!! In our house we don't have the 5 second rule, it's more like the 5 day rule. If you can pry it back up off the floor to eat it, and you still want to...go for it!

Anyway, now the kids line up for lunch and before they reach the entrance to the cafeteria, they must first pass by the "Gel Keeper." She is like the "Crypt Keeper" only more creepy. So each kid puts out their hands and gets a squirt of anti-bacterial gel in their palm before they can get their meal. My mom used to tell me, "Don't worry about it. Everyone eats a pound of dirt before they die." A few years later she switched to, "Yes Mary, everyone eats a pound of dirt before they die, but I never said it had to be in the first 2 years of life!" So no, I'm not thrilled about spending my husbands hard earned money on gelatinous alcohol when there is perfectly good soap in the school bathroom.

I truly have no idea how I ended up with an extra bottle of that. What comes to mind is that I was in the process of labeling and depositing each keg of gel into the kids' designated bags when I got interrupted (a rare occurrence) and by the time I got back to my labeling, did not realize I had missed the final tank of sanitizer. It now sits silent, patiently waiting to murder germs on contact!

The other thing is tissues. They can't ask for Kleenex, that would be showing preference to a specific brand. (Apparently Elmer has cornered the market so they can ask for that by name). The trick is for each teacher to ask for enough snot rags to last through the whole year. This keeps them from having to pay for them out of their own pocket since the school districts are cutting anything they can out of the budget. I bought 7 boxes of "facial tissues" this year. Our last school did not supply paper towels either. I think I had to send in 8 rolls of those. For future reference, I draw the line at having to supply the entire school with toilet paper!

I can guarantee my Mom never had to buy "resealable plastic bags" either! Just say Ziploc for God's sake! I knew that these reclosable type bags did exist when I was in school, because some kids had their sandwich in them at lunch. Mine was always in a baggie with a flap. This was adequate I suppose, but the kids with the "high end" bags always seemed to have such soft and spongy bread on their sandwiches. Of course, my house may have just had stale bread, but I doubt it since we had 8 kids in the family and went through several loaves a day. There were also the kids who had their sandwich in tin foil. There's something inherently wrong with wrapping a PB&J in foil. I get a metallic taste in my mouth just thinking about it. Better to just stay away from those kids.

It seemed to make sense to purchase the above mentioned SEVEN boxes of Kleenex at the commissary and not at WalMart in an attempt to save some money. I figured I would grab the plastic bags there as well. In a moment of rebellion I decided that I was going to buy the "Glad" brand bags instead of ZipLoc. Darn it, I have to buy 4 boxes, I may as well save $5 by being cheap. Besides, I don't care anymore that ZipLoc has the Box Top for Education on the box! (I had been 'relieved' of my duty as Box Top Coordinator for the kids school - which is a whole other article - and I did care, I was just trying not to). So I pat myself on the back for being tough and gypping the school out of $.40 for not buying ZipLocs...until the night before school starts when I realize I bought "twist and tie" style bags. Are you kidding me? They still have those?!?!? I somehow had 2 boxes of ZipLocs in the kitchen cabinet so I labeled them and sent them to school. I wasn't going to make a special trip to the store for two more boxes of resealable ones, so by the time I actually went back and bought them, I couldn't remember which kids I was supposed to send them in with. Do you think the kids have a clue? So there they sit, waiting anxiously to suffocate something in their air-tight grip.

Why we didn't buy stock in Crayola after the 3rd kid was born, I'll never know. I think we pretty much pay for the Christmas bonus of most Crayola workers on the Eastern Seaboard. Every year, it's the crayons, the markers, the colored pencils. They don't tell you to buy Crayola, but anyone willing to send their kid to school with Rose Art crayons on the first day of kindergarten, must either a) have faith in the No Bullying policy of the school, b) have confidence that their kid will beat up anyone that dares to make fun of them, or c) wants their kid to be tagged a nerd for the next 12 years. Not only would my kids die of embarrassment if they didn't have the Crayola brand, but they must have the new box every year.

It occurred to me this year, that I have enough Crayola paraphernalia in my house to supply 27 Afghani schools. But before I ship it all off, wouldn't it work to just give the kids 10 markers that I promise I will triple check to make sure they are not dry? Can I not just wrap a rubber band around them since they go from the new box into the pencil case within the first 52 seconds of the first day of school and therefore no one will remember that you didn't have a brand new box by the end of the first weekend??? No, apparently not.

Since the school district feels they no longer have to supply classrooms with tissues and paper towels, they must've told the art department they are SOL as well. "Dear Art Teachers, because we have pissed off the classroom teachers by making them buy their own tissues we feel like we have to take some of your supplies away too. This way we will be considered equal opportunity scumbags. Therefore, we will still take care of everything except for water colors. We opted for these because you can buy them at WalMart. We will allow you to add them to the 'school supply list' so the responsibility for this purchase now rests on the parents shoulders. Just so you know, we told the teachers they could put tissues on the list to save them from having to spend their own money, but because we like you better we will let you pick out any additional random supply to also add to the list. We suggest Baby Wipes. Sincerely, School District # blah, blah, blah"

Just to be obnoxious, the art department decided they would indeed put water colors on the supply list. And instead of listing Crayola as an acceptable brand because it happens to be the only brand that WalMart and even the Kansas City Targets carry, they specify that the water color paints should be "Prang" brand. Never heard of it, can't find it. And so therefore, in my second rebellious stand I purchased Crayola and decided to let the kids live dangerously. In the process of not finding Prang paints I bought Crayola from a couple different stores. Due to yet another interruption, I somehow missed labeling and placing those in a bag as well. So there they sit; 12 divots of concentrated color waiting to adhere themselves to anything from paper to fingernails to unwashable shoes!

After more than a few trips to several different stores, I put everything in the dining room. I opened the new label maker I'd bought 4 months ago and I went label crazy. I feel the need to put the kids names on EVERYTHING, even the stuff that goes into a pile for the class to use. I want their names on the box of Kleenex so every time that teacher goes over to it, they will see my child's name. This way, in April, when they have gone through all the boxes sent to school in September, they will think to themselves, "Hmmm, I know I calculated the amount of tissues needed for a class of 26 kids living in Kansas averaging 3.8 colds during the school year, but I calculated wrong...Well, I know I saw more than one box with Josie's name on it. I certainly won't be bothering Mrs. Carlton to send any more in! I'll hit up Tommy's parents instead!" Always thinkin', I am always thinkin'!

Again, I claim no responsibility for the dry erase markers. Despite the fact that most schools have done away with the original chalk board and are now using Smart Boards and dry erase boards the stores have not caught on. You would think that since I have to send in a total of 9 blue or black dry erase markers, I would be able to purchase blue or black dry erase markers in something other than a "rainbow" pack. Because I refused (in my 3rd act of defiance) to purchase five $10 packages of 8 multi colored markers just so I could get the black and blue ones out to send to school. They went in without them on the first day. A friend who was headed to the 'big city' picked them up at Staples for me. And there they sit, ready to draw on anything and smear on everything.

But as I said before, somehow, somewhere, someway I screwed up. I blame the kids. I keep saying I'd be a great Mom if I didn't have to deal with them. Always interrupting, wanting to be fed, clothed, sheltered...brats! Now I am left with these extra supplies and I have no clue where they belong.

As I finish writing this the same supplies are still in my possession. No longer on the buffet. They were moved to the 'craft closet' when I had Sawyer's birthday party. Since they are no longer in my line of vision everyday, I have yet to resolve the issue of who didn't bring in the required items.

On one final note, I would like to point out that I see no reason for me to sharpen all of the kids pencils before they arrive the first day. Seeing as the school required 48 #2s from the Carlton family, I felt that sharpening 24 of them went above and beyond the duty of a Mom. And that's me; always the overachiever!

School Haze

Ahhh, it's that time of year again. Lucky for me, in the great state of Kansas, that times comes earlier than most of the country.

The heat continues to scorch the brown straw that was once grass, several lame sit-coms have yet to premiere and the new season of Saturday Night Live has not begun. Friends of mine on the East coast are getting in one more trip to beach, they are still wearing white, and their kids are watching another iCarly marathon.

And yet, MY KIDS HAVE STARTED SCHOOL!!! Which is further proof (not that I needed any more) there is a God. And He is GOOD!

They returned to their day prison on a Tuesday. Not starting on a Monday "gave the children the opportunity to meet their teachers and find their desks." Yeah right! This is just the school districts way of subliminally making the kids think they are starting after a 3 day weekend...like, say, Labor Day?!?!

What cracks me up is that in the first couple weeks they couldn't go outside for recess. Are you ready for this? It was too HOT!!! I'm not quite sure if that's ironic or just a bummer. (But I can with a fair amount of confidence that Alanis Morissette doesn't know either). We had something crazy like 32 consecutive days over 90 degrees. I could gross you out and tell you about the frogs that kept jumping onto our air conditioning unit only to dehydrate in the sun...but I'll refrain.

Don't get me wrong, no one is happier than me that the kids started early (with or without outdoor recess). And PLEASE don't feel sorry for them. Since they got out in late May, they did have a full summer, as did I. It all works out, except of course for those kids who moved here after getting out of school, in another state, in late June. Their parents are thrilled, unlike the parents who moved away from Kansas this summer. Those kids got out of school in May and don't go back until Sept. To those of you with that unfortunate fate, I do send my apologies...pahahahahaha. SUCKERS!!!!! No, really. I'm sorry...heh heh heh heh. I know, I know, it'll be me in a few years and I shouldn't laugh...but I can't help it. I'm just so darn giddy!

My happiness was slightly quelled when I realized that Sawyer's preschool had changed their dates and now he starts a month after the other kids. Seriously?!?! What the heck am I supposed to do with him all month? I got stuff to do! And it does not include making him pepperoni pizza and changing his diaper several times a day. I know I should be so thrilled and proud that he has been "discharged" from his Special Ed. classroom and will be completely mainstreamed this year. I am. Well, I was. Then I realized that Special Ed. preschool started the same week that the other kids did and mainstream preschool started substantially later. It was shortly after this blow that it occurred to me that he will no longer have the "short bus" come pick him up every day.

I've said before, I'm a big fan of the short bus. I admit, I was one of those kids who made fun of the short bus when I was young and as I became an adult, hoped I wouldn't have a child ever have to ride the short bus. But the more you come in contact with special needs kids, the more you realize they don't have cooties, they're not contagious, they are just kids trying to be kids. And the drivers and assistants on the buses Sawyer rode had pretty much reached Sainthood in my eyes by the end of the year.

First of all, the short bus comes right to your front door! You can't beat that on a day when the wind chill is 15 below. (We're in Kansas remember?) And, on the days that Sawyer was taking off one shoe every time I was retying the other one, they waited! For a long time!!! The day he saw the bus coming and sprinted around to the back of the house, I think the driver said, "Wow Sawyer, I didn't know you could run so fast!" I can think of a few things I would've said if I were the driver. I think I had a few bus drivers back in the day that would've waited until the parent left and then cussed the kid out! Come to think of it, maybe she did do that and he couldn't tell me, but I prefer to think she didn't. Plus, and this is not a small factor, ANYONE willing to keep careful track of Frog gets major points in my book!

**If you need further explanation, please go back and read "Dear Frog." I promise that will clue you in.**

Now that they have started school, I realized I had been anticipating the yearly debut of my all time favorite TV commercial. Maybe they haven't started airing it yet, but you know what I'm talking about. "It's the most wonderful time of the year..." The Mom's and Dad's dancing through Staples just gives me goosebumps! Really, can it be stated any better? I'm hoping that they haven't done away with that commercial. The majority of my TV viewing lately consists of "Good Luck Charlie" and "SpongeBob Drive Me Crazy Pants." Perhaps Staples doesn't see much profit margin from advertising miserable kids to the tweens. However, they ought to realize many parents' TVs are taken hostage by Disney Channel and Nickelodeon, and therefore would be smart to show that commercial. Think of they joy they would bring all those parents who have been forced to have "iSaved your Life" as background noise AGAIN!!! How many times can they watch the same one??? That's a rhetorical question as it's apparently enough times that I can quote most of every episode!

But, back to my point. Staples, if you're out there....I'm waiting!