Shopping for school supplies is one of my favorite things to do. Period. Wierd, I know. But I love it. I was always ready to go back to school after about 2 weeks of summer and I anticipated getting new supplies all summer. I still love the fall and the promise of learning new things---and getting to go buy school supplies. I set a $50 budget for supplies and $100 for clothes, a little game to make it fun. (And yes, I do understand that my idea of fun is a bit warped!) We shopped over the course of 3 weeks, using ads for stores we were going to go to anyway. 10 cents for notebooks, .20 for crayons, etc. Buy one get one free backpacks and lunchboxes. Even Brandon enjoys shopping for school supplies and always manages to pick out a few things for his "office" at home. Of course, I had to pick up some extra stuff for me. Brandon has a pretty standard supply list, but Jacob's is always a little different since they don't need a lot of the things on the standard list. This is the first time I've had to send velcro, but they use it for so many activities to attach pieces, so it makes sense. We go through a lot of it here at home making folder puzzles and such to keep him busy. I send a camera with Jacob since I don't really get to go up to his school, because it disrupts his day, and therefore the rest of the class, so the teachers are really good about snapping a camera's worth of pictures each semester so we can see what he does. The backpacks they chose match their (at the moment) favorites: Thomas for Jacob, of course, and Brandon immediately zeroed in on the Ben 10 backpack and was pretty happy with the Transformers lunch kit. At least he was happy about something for school. For clothes, Brandon usually only needs tennies and shirts; sadly he gets enough hand me up shorts and jeans from Jacob that he doesn't need any. Jacob needs the whole smash, but he's moving out of the chewing on the shirts stage again, so hopefully we won't need to go buy more tshirts every month.
