The School Supply Shop

Yesterday was the day of the dreaded School Supply Shop. Those parents among you whose children are yet small enough that this remains a distant rite of passage...it comes! It comes!

I had seen the ads in the paper on Sunday indicating that spiral notebooks had made it down to ten cents at Target...that always means it is Time. You do not want to go before Time when only Wal-Mart and H-E-B have marked a tantalizing sprinkling of items down. Not everything is cheap yet, then, although that timeframe does have the advantage of avoiding the hordes. Once Target gets the notebooks down, it is Time, though; everything is as cheap as it is going to get. Very shortly after Time, the stores run out of the precious spiral notebooks and two-pocket folders with brads, so it is important to be swift. When the stores resupply these items, all school supplies cost about seven times as much as they cost when it is Time.

We did the bulk of the shop at Target this year (H-E-B and Wal-Mart are just as good when it is Time) and the hordes were still all in a mad frenzy. Going on Tuesday instead of on Sunday morning cost us, because they were already out of all two-pocket folders with brads except for purple ones and they need to be different colors for different subjects. We got one purple, knowing we would have to search other stores for the other six we needed. We went down the district's fifth grade supply list and got everything on it except the missing folders and then moved on to the things-we-knew-we-needed-from-personal-experience that were not on the list. The Lone Star Girl's school is seriously big on sharpies so we needed a couple of "fine" ones and a couple of "ultra-fine" ones. Target didn't have the "ultra-fine" ones. We needed book covers. The Lone Star Girl talked me into getting red pens at Target instead of embarking on an extensive quest of arcane places for the red pencils on the list which can never, ever be found at any of the main hunting grounds. I had already acquired for her one of those white erasers that also are never in evidence. We got her a new lunchbox to replace her old, torn one but I refused to budge on making her use her old backpack for another year. I also got a bunch of supplies for my classroom like the good teacher I hope to be.

It went okay. No one ran over us although it was close a few times. The Lone Star Baby was ensorceled by the crowd and behaved well until falling asleep in a heap in her carseat, worn out by the adventure. We dropped her off at home with Lone Star Pa and soldiered on to Office Depot where we acquired the needed folders and sharpies at the prices of last resort.

Then we were finished. Whew. Until next July...