school supplies quandries

One of my favorite back-to-school activities is getting the supplies. Back in the day, my elementary school supply list included new crayons, water color paints and a “Big Chief tablet” among other items. I loved the potential of the unsharpened pencils and empty notebooks, the promise of a school year’s worth of learning ahead of us. But I can remember resenting my parents’ choice not to buy certain items on the list if they didn’t think they were necessary. I didn’t like it either when they ignored the specified size or quantity of an item and bought what they thought was a better deal.

I always thought I could do better. But this year, my son ended up with an orange folder instead of a yellow one. The list specified sturdy plastic folders in red, yellow, blue and green. The store we were at didn’t have sturdy yellow folders so I told him orange was close enough. I didn’t want to go to another store to look for one when we’d already gotten everything else – except the one item I never could find. I looked at several stores for the Elmer’s X-treme glue stick the art teacher requested, but never found one. I was planning to ask about this at the open house. I completely forgot. It wasn’t until after the open house was over that I also realized I forgot to include the most perplexing item on the school supplies list: 1 old clean sock.

School hasn’t started yet, so there’s still a chance to rectify two out of my three failures. Perhaps I should order that glue stick for “bigger, tougher projects” online and scrounge up an old clean sock. Imagine the potential!   

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