First Day of 2nd Grade

It's that time of year again! Time to send my kid back to school.

Anxious. Shy. Curious.

And with a bag full to overflowing with supplies.

You know, there's nothing quite like waiting until the day before school starts to purchase all of the supplies! There were lines, sure, but nothing really terrible. The sales were pretty good at the place we went - 1 cent for bottles of white school glue; 20 cents for a box of crayons. We'll see how long they last this year. Last year there was some sort of Crayon Crime Ring going down in her classroom. My daughter and some other kids lost a remarkable number of markers and crayons. I started thinking about RFID chips and sting operations until I thought about just what the repercussions would be if I discovered the crayon cache.

There I'd be with a bucket full of cracked, snapped, stubby, melted or mangled crayons. Huh. Not particularly useful. So we just sucked it up and bought another set when asked to.

Sigh! My life as a nascent crime fighter nipped in the bud!

Arriving at school with style.

For awhile there this morning, it looked as if I was going to miss out on the drop off. I was tired and the twins weren't awake yet. I wasn't willing to wake them up to walk up to the school because of the potential for screaming, but they woke up just in time. So the whole family - all five of us - trooped up to the school and looked around for her new class.

Caitlin came all over shy and wouldn't say hello to anyone she knew from last year. I wasn't sure if we were going to have to scrape her off one of our legs or not, but eventually she was ready to go in when her class started moving.

I hope she's going to have a good year. I hope she'll make some good friends. I hope she behaves well. I really hope her teacher likes her since I've heard her new teacher is supposed to be faaaabulous. Award winning, even! I have high hopes this year.

Caitlin: Second Grader

You know what? I think she'll be fine!

How is it that she's old enough to be in second grade, anyway?!

My favorite items on the list this year were the deck of cards and the optional dice. My first response was how many and what type? What sort of damage are they expected to roll in second grade, anyway? Would 20 sided dice be OK? Are they going to be playing poker in there? Craps?

Yeah, yeah. You say they're for math. Suuuuure they are!

Hey, do you remember going school shopping as a kid? What was your favorite purchase? I always liked the smell of the Mead composition notebooks and newly sharpened pencils.

Ooh! and the smell of freshly made mimeographs. (Yeah - I'm practically carbon dating myself aren't I?) Does anyone remember those? In the days before copy machines (Why when I was your age...!) you had that thing with the big roller that ca-chunk-chunk-chunked out copies. Maybe it was all the fumes making me woozy, but I remember the slightly damp paper and the blue ink and I kinda liked it!

If you've got school age kids, how's your first day of school going? Or if you're in school, of course - I won't discriminate!