School surprise

Laura, my almost fifth-grader, has been cleaning up her room for almost a week. We’d been discussing how her room needed cleaning, how impossible it was to walk in, and was there in fact any carpet in the room at all? since it certainly wasn’t visible. I had just decided to keep the door closed and make her work on it on her own, because usually when I help her clean her room I holler. And holler. And holler some more for the sake of variety. And I am generally not the hollering type. Room cleaning days are my worst parenting days ever. She finally started on her own when her school supply list came in the mail, after weeks of her asking daily if I thought her letter would come today—because I told her we wouldn’t go shopping for school stuff until her room was clean, even if that wasn’t until September. She finished last night, so all four of us marched off to Wal-Mart to shell out what ended up being $74.00, and we’re not even done yet.

Will got really excited about this notion of shopping for school supplies, unsurprisingly since we realized in the store he thought we were saying school surprise. A rather crushing disappointment, somewhat leavened by the fact that we let him pick out a Batman toothbrush and toothpaste for his new room. Yes, even Will has a school supply list, since he’ll be moving up from the Glow Worm class to the Caterpillar preschool room:

1 pack glue sticks
1 bottle glue
2 boxes tissues
1 box or refill of FLUSHABLE wipes
1 pack washable markers
1 pack play dough
cot sheet/blanket (crib sheets work best)
complete change of clothes
toothbrush
water bottle
toothpaste
pictures for class collage

Laura’s list of twenty-two items includes various organizational dividers and band-aids and two reams of printer paper, as well as the annual prohibition against rolling book bags and Trapper Keepers, which evidently are two of the major sources of evil in elementary school, as they have been forbidden on every supply list we’ve ever gotten from Orange Elementary.

Aside from keeping Laura from her school shopping for almost a whole week, I have done other interesting bad Mama things lately. Like earlier when I was driving Will to his dentist appointment and realized that not only did I forget to brush his teeth that morning, but I am pretty sure we didn’t brush them the night before either. And this year I was determined not to forget Laura’s new classroom open house like I did last year (I swear, it was in tiny print, in a really long letter, nothing to set the date and time out, and it’s the only one we ever missed!)—and I didn’t forget, but we had plans already to go to the beach with my mother for one last fling before school. Laura kept trying to think of how to somehow do both. I guess that’s not a terrible bad Mama thing, since I didn’t have advance notice, but after five years of school you’d think I might remember when they usually have open house.

And then I cheated on William’s summer reading program record. The librarian gave us this sheet with a picture of ten clowns, and each time he read for 90 minutes, he was supposed to color in a clown. Once they were all colored he could get his reading medal and put his name up on the library window with all the other kids. I watched Laura like a hawk, since she’s rather prone to thinking that reading for a half hour was really twice as long, but she’s on her third sheet and has read every minute of those damn clowns—she filled up one alone just reading the new Harry Potter novel. But Will is only three, and I really think the library should have a little more reasonable expectations about a baby’s attention span. I counted every clown as fifteen minutes, and if the library’s got a problem with my commitment to reading, that’s just too damn bad.

Somehow summer’s ending and school beginning is such a vexed time, odd for a family who loves school and with two teacher-parents. So I tossed all those washable markers and pencils and forty-eight packs of crayons into the cart, grumbling about how expensive everything is, knowing full well that we have about two thousand markers and pencils and crayons at home. But I also know that both my children will show up, shiny and new on their first day of class, with markers just as bright and fresh as they are. Will doesn’t quite know the difference yet, but boy, does Laura. She’ll be marching off with her new Polo messenger bag, hoping nobody can tell we bought it way cheap at T. J. Maxx, five neon highlighters tucked in the outside pocket for any reading emergency.

I’ll take a picture that morning, like I always do, and smile when I remember the great drama of Laura in her little first-day of school dress marching off to kindergarten, me sniffling along behind her. This year she’ll be a safety patrol kid, towering a good foot over the baby kindergarteners. William will show up with a Batman toothbrush, far too old now for last year’s Winnie the Pooh, and ready to start writing, since he knows Laura writes at school. He asked me the other day to help him write his name, so we did. He needed, he explained, help with his homework. My God, don’t we all?