First Day of School

It is that time of the year again. The time where I have to pull out my organizer hat. With three school supply lists and a pile of supplies leftover from last year I have my work cut out for me. My professional advice to me “How does one eat an elephant?… one bite at a time of course.” This is how I will tackle this elephant.

Step 1 – Gather all of last years supplies into one common spot. We have chosen the air hockey table in the basement.

Step 2 – Eliminate anything that is obviously garbage… yes the fuzzy thing you found in the bookbag is garbage… as a matter of fact the bookbag may be garbage now too! What you are left with now is everything that can be reused.

Step 3 – Take all your lists, in our case we have three, and make a master list of all the individual items and how many of each item you need. Cross off what you already have, and what is remaining is the final shopping list.

Step 4 – With shopping list in hand and a wallet full of cash head out to your local school supply store. Fill your cart, check off list and hand over the dough. I managed to do this in one hour and was surprised with the amount I spent… it was not too bad. *****Advice from a teacher friend… in the younger grades don’t get all fancy with the supplies, it goes in a common pile and the teachers hand out from the pile.

Step 5 – With the shopping finished you can now bag all the supplies to take in on the first day of school.

Now before the bagging commenced my lovely teenager arrived with her friends and was having a look around at the supply table. Dr Jekyll/Ms Hyde (aka 13 year old daughter) was not impressed with the generic school supplies that I purchased. Here is how the conversation went… Mommy they are so ugly I want pretty stuff… wait remember the pretty binders I wanted in that box that came a few weeks ago? The box she is referring to came from Office Max for the webinar I attended on August 6th. It was full of colorful, pretty and cute (Ms Hyde’s exact words) supplies that she was grabbing before I even had them out of the box. Now I am a paper lover myself so we put the box of pretty items away until I was finished with the Back To School Shopping.

Here we are weeks later, I have all the supplies purchased and the pretty stuff is now ready for distribution… one for teenager… one for mommy….I like colorful writing books too. At the end she is happy, I am happy and grateful that Office Max provides some options for a fussy teenager.

I also suggest that if you are looking for some back to school organization tips the webinar that Office Max did was awesome. There were a few great tips that we are going to implement this year… Peter Walsh the organization guru from TLC’s Clean Sweep and Office Max hosted this event that included some real life teachers, a blogger and some students. The video of the webinar has some great tips on getting organized so that your kiddies are better able to be successful at school. With Peter’s basic 3 steps you can do this easily and painlessly.

Enjoy….and a Happy Back to School to you!