Kids' School Routine Is Never That for Mom

Whew!! School has been open for a couple of weeks and I think
we are into a routine, but just barely.
Since I had expected the baby to be born right before school
started, I was remarkably well organized - for me.
I took Colleen and Johnny to the doctor for physicals. We all
went to the dentist, everyone had a haircut. We made a trip to the
school uniform store. I had Patrick's pants hemmed.
One morning we went to the shoe store and then to buy all the
school supplies. I came home from that outing out of patience and
even more out of money, but before I collapsed on the couch, we
organized the school bags.
I registered John and the girls. I took Patrick to his book sale,
and arranged car pools to John's kindergarten and Mike's
preschool.
When I had all these things accomplished I breathed a sigh of
relief and went to the hospital to give birth and rest up.
After reading that list, don't you agree my family's first day of
school should have run smoothly? If not, you most likely have
children in school, or had at one time.
You know that no matter how prepared you are for the first day
of school, you will still be overwhelmed with things to do for the
second day of school.
I am considering having a rubber stamp made of our biographical
data. I'll use it to stamp the census cards that parents are asked to
fill out for each child every school year.
Although it isn't difficult to write down our name, address, place
of employment, etc, I have a terrible time completing the cards.
I think the repetition gets to me. How come if I write down my
child's name on the front of the card, the people in authority forget
whose card it is by the time they look at the back, so I have to write
the name again?
Book covering is another jagged stone on my path to a smooth
start of school. On the first three days of school, Colleen, Maureen
and Machaela each brought home several books to be covered.
At first we used nice bookcovers we had purchased. When they
were gone, we used grocery bags. When we ran out of bags, we had
to borrow more from our neighbor.
One of the borrowed bags had a Statue of Liberty design, which
Maureen insisted I use to cover one of her books.
Like filling in census cards, covering books isn't too difficult with
the exception of trying to center the Statue of liberty on the
front of a social studies text - but it is time consuming.
I feel guilty about spending so much time looking at the outside
of the books, when I could be looking inside to see what my
children will be learning.
This school year the kids decided they wanted to take lunch
instead of buying it every day.
I preferred having them buy lunch, so that I never had to worry
about buying lunch food. My student body said they never packed
lunches before because, "There's never anything good around here
to take for lunch."
So this year I've gone to the grocery store almost every day to
get lunch fixings. We still don't have anything good to take for
lunch, because it all gets eaten as after school snacks.
Adjusting to a new school year usually takes some time. I figure
we ought to have things running smoothly just in time for
Christmas vacation.
September 24, 1986