The Holy Grail of School Supplies

On Friday, I dragged my son out to Wal-Mart on our tax-free weekend to get school supplies. This was my first time ever buying supplies for my own child. I’ve always bought miscellaneous school supplies for my classroom. Long ago, I got frustrated at the number of students who didn’t come prepared to class with scissors or colored pencils, so I used some of my classroom funds to just buy a class set. I haven’t regretted that for a moment–it’s much easier!

Armed with my list at 7:00 in the morning, I hoped to avoid the crowds. There were actually more people there than I expected at that hour. I wandered through the aisles, happily buying the SIX boxes of crayons , and searching for primary composition notebooks. I learned a few things on that trip. One, primary composition notebooks were nowhere to be found. For those of you who don’t have small kids, these are the composition notebooks where the top half of the page is empty for pictures, and the bottom half has the extra large handwriting spaces, for students who are just learning to form letters. Regular composition notebooks don’t work since kindergarteners don’t have the fine motor skills to write that small. Believe it or not, Wal-Mart hadn’t ordered any.

So, I tried OfficeMax. You’d think that an office supply store would have them. Like before, the clerk knew what I meant, but they didn’t have them either. At this point, my son was starting to self-destruct. “Why is this taking so long? Why can’t we go home?” After casting him a look of death, I took him out for a breakfast snack. Nothing like a little fast food to make a boy happy. At this point, I was beginning to feel like a knight in search of the Holy Grail. Ordering online was beginning to look better and better.

Finally, it hit me. The teacher store! Of course. They would have them. So, I dragged him across the county…only to find that they weren’t open until 11:00 a.m. You can imagine the litany of words going through my mind at this point. K-Mart was next door, so I decided to give it a shot. I spoke with one of the ladies stocking supplies, and both of us struck out. At that point, I decided I needed to console myself by buying a book. Whom should I find at the book aisle? The goddess of all books…the Levy’s distributor! She was busy putting out all of the new Harlequin titles. We had the nicest chat about books, and she promised to call me when my book is out in the stores next month so I can sign them.

Eventually, I came home, looked them up online and found that Office Depot carried them. I bribed my son with the promise of pizza for lunch, and I bought what we needed. It took almost the entire day.

I think back to when my own school days and I remember having a plastic Garfield lunch box with a thermos (mine was yellow). Do you know that almost no one sells Thermoses (sp.?) anymore? They seem to be extinct.

What kind of lunch box did you have growing up? Were you the coolest person in school or what?