School supply shopping can be deadly

It’s that time of year again. That holiday I dread every August. It’s back-to-school shopping time.

Every year I say I’ll be proactive and be the first mommy at the store to buy the glue sticks and Crayola markers as they pull them off the truck. And every year I’m battling other slacker moms on the day before the school’s Open House. Open House: the day when the kids have to take all their school supplies to school, put their crayons in one box, their dry erase markers in another, and the rest of the supplies in their new desk.

Tomorrow is Open House. Which meant today was school supply shopping day. I take procrastination to a whole new level.

I completely forgot about school supplies until late last night Lee said, “Don’t the kids start school next week? When are you going to buy their school supplies?”

My face turned up like I had just smelled something fowl and I said, “Shit! I totally forgot about school supplies. Is school supply shopping something I can hire somebody to do? I bet Angelina Jolie doesn’t do her own school supply shopping.”

But, even though I scoured Craigslist, I could find a single classified for anybody looking to be my school supply bitch.

So today Lee picked me at noon so we could head to Target to get in to a fist fight with other slacker parents over the last post-it notes or Fiskar scissors. But, surprisingly, it wasn’t too busy. Apparently some other parents were trying to show me up this year and did their shopping ahead of time. Brown nosers. Even more shockingly, Target had just about everything I needed. The only thing I couldn’t get was pink erasers and a TI-83 calculator.

Everything seemed to be going so well for us. And then it happened. Somewhere between grabbing the perfect ruler, finding the last of the index cards, and discovering they were out of the right graphing calculator, I realized…I was touching the shopping cart. With my bare hands.

I started to feel faint. I called out for Lee as I was losing consciousness. “LEE…I’m touching the cart. For the love of God. Take the cart. NOW!”

I scoured my purse in search of my hand sanitizer. I figured I had about 6.8 seconds before I lost control of my bodily functions. But MY SANITIZER WASN’T THERE. “Where’s my sanitizer?” I howled to Lee.

“I think I saw it on your desk. Right next to your laptop,” he said with a little bit of a smile that I totally did not appreciate. Couldn’t he see this was a life or death situation?

“We need to get to the hand sanitizer section STAT,” I yelled already scurrying in that direction.

The hand sanitizer was clear across the store. It was probably only about 100 feet away, but it felt like 100 miles. Half way there I broke in to a jog leaving Lee behind.

I found the soap aisle and searched for some sanitizer. My eyes honed right in on it. Shaking, I grabbed the first one I saw, squirted some in to my hand, and rubbed it in. Just then Lee turned the corner in to the aisle, laughing his ass off at me. Jerk.

So all is good. I was able to sanitize before the infection set in. And we got all of the school supplies we needed.

But I don’t know if I can do this all over again next year. Anybody want to sign up to be my school supply bitch for next year?

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2. Shopping: A [not so] scientific study on the habits of men and women Last Frida
3. Skipping school the hard way Today was

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