back to school blues

I might be the only parent out there NOT looking forward to back to school. On one hand, I do look forward to my electric bill going back down - with the kids home all day, every day, my a/c has been cranking, and the electric bill has been $250 a month easily. But on the other hand, I don’t look forward to trudging through the store buying all of the assorted crap required to go back to school…dry erase markers, 37 composition books, fancy calculators that will probably never be used, and the like. I don’t ever recall my parents buying me a $100 calculator for school, which come to think of it, is probably why I failed Algebra and had to retake it.

Back to school also requires me to be ON TOP OF THINGS. Like checking homework and signing permission slips and writing out checks for one field trip or another. I have to be ON TOP OF THINGS all day long at work, and when I come home, I like to be done with that sort of nonsense. It’s lovely to come home from work and know that as long as the kids are fed and loved, I have done my job, but that is simply not good enough come August 24th. And the paper - don’t even get me STARTED on the amount of paper generated by the school. Not a day passes that 10 different forms are sent home - fill out this in triplicate, or hold onto this because we’re going to refer to information on it 6 months from now!

So yeah, I guess my kids aren’t the only ones in our house not looking forward to their return to school.