Class Act

Despite my penchant for and skills in one or two areas of moral turpitude, I am at heart a rule-follower. I like rules. Perhaps more to the point, I am bad at breaking rules. When I attempt to transgress - cutting in line, pretending I don't understand, getting indignant when someone calls me on breaking a rule - I am immediately busted. So it went with the school supplies as the Dinos and Mouse reported for the first day of school. I was so indignant at having to buy so many of the damned things that I deliberately refrained from sorting them, planning to dump all 100 lbs of them at the feet of some teacher or administrator and flee. Of course, that didn't work. The school thwarted my evil plans with its carefully choreographed intake system, which made it all but impossible for a parent to enter the school building or abandon kids and supplies at a single central point. So I wound up dragging the kids and the ton of supplies back and forth past the front of the building in search of a soft-eyed administrator until the Dinos started panicking about being late. In desparation, I sent each child off with a bag of random supplies - Huey Dino got six boxes of kleenex, Riley Dino got 24 two-pocket folders, and Mouse had dry erase markers and a protractor and attempted to hand off the rest to a hard-eyed admin type in front of the main entrance. "You were supposed to sort them," she said in exasperation. "You need to bring them back tomorrow sorted for each child." As a helpful explanation, she noted, "Each grade needs different supplies. There was a list."

Thanks, lady. Really?

I started to flap and squawk about the vast quantities of school supplies but quickly saw it was pointless and skulked back to my car.

This morning each of the kids went off to school with a carefully sorted bag of the remaining supplies and a note for teacher explaining how I screwed up the first day's delivery. I am definitely joining the PTA this year just so I can get them to do the school supplies sale my commenter mentioned. Maybe while I'm there I can do something about the blankity-blanking emergency contact forms. These don't appear to have been updated since the punch-card era and the school wants them completed by hand (in itty-bitty script) in duplicate. Duplicate? Are you kidding me? Hope the kids don't have problems today since I just xeroxed a second copy of each form on the printer-fax-copy machine in our bedroom.

This is Mouse's first week of public school, otherwise known as her first week without day care and the first week of my countdown to an empty nest. Thirteen more years! She will turn 18 three weeks after I turn 50. We are already planning our celebratory spa weekend - assuming we're still on speaking terms by then, of course.