It's the most wonderful time of the year

Today I took K and L to Staples to buy ink for our printer that has this persnickety habit of refusing to print black and white documents if it's out of cyan and magenta ink. It makes no sense to me, but I was finally bullied by those "warning" messages (and it's refusal to do anything but blare those warning messages) into going out to get ink.

Do you know what they have smack dab in the middle of Staples?

School supplies. Bin after bin of colorful rulers, fresh boxes of crayons, and pencils with snazzy designs and glittery rubber grips.

I dutifully picked up the printer ink first, but then I wandered back to the education section and meandered past all those bins full of treasure. Does anyone else out there have a passion for new school supplies? The one thing I miss with homeschooling is going through the school supply list and seeing my kids decked out with new backpacks filled with shiny new folders (6, with brads in red, blue, green, yellow, purple, and orange) and boxes of baby wipes (are we sending them to the nursery or what?).

The lure of the supplies proved too strong and, reasoning that it would be special for the girls to have a few new things, each of them picked out a pencil bag with matching folder and ruler and I got some fun erasers and pencils. They happily packed their new and old supplies into their new pencil bags as soon as we got home and showed them off to Daddy.

Tomorrow morning - well, late tomorrow morning since I'm planning to take the girls to the Extreme Makeover: Home Edition rally at our church first thing tomorrow - we'll sit down with our new supplies and get working on some handwriting skills. The girls are so excited to start school again, and I have to admit I am, too. Especially now that my printer is cooperating again and I can actually print off some worksheets I need. Maybe I'll even go wild and print them in color.