Back to School Shopping? Already???

Summer! Summer is great! Everyone loves summer!

Summer is the best time of the year to do so many fun things. Things like: Hiking! Camping! Parades! Fireworks! Family reunions! Swimming! Going to the beach! Running through the sprinklers! Picnics! Eating popsicles! Back to school shopping! (Wait…what?)

Back to school shopping? Seriously? We’re barely into August. There’s a lot of summer left. We can’t be thinking of “back to school” stuff yet. School doesn’t start until…wait, what’s that? You say school starts on August 21st? Oh my, that’s just a couple of weeks away! Dang, I guess I do have to start getting ready.

Nobody likes “back to school” shopping in August. Well, almost nobody. My wife is a school teacher, and she actually likes to go “back to school” shopping IN JULY!!! You see, she loves school supplies, so she gets excited to go to the stores in early July because, she says, “as soon as they take down the stuff for the 4^th of July, they put out the school supplies!”

The Wife is addicted to school supplies. (Hey, at least it's cheaper and healthier than cocaine!)

She loves the pencils and pens and notebooks and staplers and glue and erasers and binders and folders and all of that stuff. She’ll fill her shopping cart full of things “for my students,” not admitting that most of what she is buying is for herself.

Of course, there is more to “back to school” shopping than just school supplies. Kids need new clothes for school, too. Because, apparently, if a kid shows up during the first week of school wearing clothes that they wore at any time during the previous school year, they might get sent back a grade.

Yes, I understand that the beginning of the school year is a good time to get the kids new clothes because they often outgrow the clothes they wore the year before. That’s why I advocate buying kid clothes that are two or three sizes too big so they can last for two or three years. It’s a great idea! As an adult, I’ve been wearing some of the same shirts for twenty years, and no one has made fun of me because of it! (At least, not that I know of.) Look at Charlie Brown. He's been wearing the same oversized shirt for decades and no one ever teases him or calls him names. (Well, except for "Blockhead," but I think that's more due to the size of his head than his choice in big, baggy, zig-zaggy shirts.)

So, The Wife loves the school supplies and the shopping for kid clothes. She even really likes teaching. But, she’s still torn when it comes to “back to school,” because she wishes it didn’t have to mean the end of the fun of the parades, picnics, fireworks, and the beach.


Edited from an article originally published in the August 2015 edition of the ServeDaily newspaper.