Georgia's Tax Free weekend...Back To School!!!!!

This is the weekend when everyone in Georgia can go shopping for school supplies and clothing; computers and other stuff....

Tax Free!!!!

I wasn't thinking about that when I decided to take Boo-boo and drive down to the Super Tar-ché just to be out of the house for a while.

She had not wanted to take her nap, and my back and ribs are still tender, I can't pick her up much, so I thought, a nice little drive and stroll would do the trick.

She napped on the way, hummed herself to sleep.

The store was jammed with moms and kids and loaded shopping carts.

What fun!

I went to the corner of the store where they have all the school supplies and marveled at all the cool stuff they have these days.

Even though I hated school, especially the last few years, the preparations for a new school year were always very exiting.

In elementary school we never needed to buy anything, the school provided it all.

We lived in a new neighborhood, built right after the war.

Our parish was one of the largest in The Hague. We had four girl schools (buildings)and probably as many boy schools. Initially we were housed in temporary buildings until the 'real' schools were finished, and sometimes we shared classrooms in "other religion" schools, or "gasp!" PUBLIC schools. Never mind the Catholic schools were pretty much public too. :>)

The average family in our parish had 4 kids, I even know a few who had more than 12! Kids galore!

My very first memory of "school" was kindergarten, when my Opa walked me to school every day. It was in an old brick building with wooden floors. We had to wear felt covers over our shoes.
I clearly remember the smells of wooden pencils and paper. I also remember I had a little silver ring with ladybug on it. :>) There were sand boxes on the playground but they were fenced in and I don't recall ever being able to play in them.

When we moved to our new neighborhood in 1953 I was still in kindergarten. A couple of classrooms housed in a building that belonged to a family who ran a printers business on the premises. Smack in the middle of some woods and farm land.

First, second and third grade were spent in the Pieterlangendijkstraat. A brand new building.
It smelled new, it sounded new. (When my son and I went back to Holland in the 70s, he went to kindergarten there :>)

Fourth and fifth grade I spent in a temporary wooden building, which by the way, was still there last time I visited. That was SOME temporary! The whole neighborhood is being torn down around it now and THAT frigging building is still there!

Sixth grade was in another new building, right next to our church. The girls building on one side, the boys on the other. We were NOT allowed to mingle. Recess was planned so the girls and boys would not be outside at the same time.

Then came high school (7th, 8th, 9th and 10th grade)

Again, a brand new school. All metal and glass this time.

In high school (MULO this was called, which basically stands for More Extended Elementary Education) we had to start providing our own notebooks, pens, and such. We were still a girls only school :>)

With nuns :>)


I LOVED going shopping for this stuff then and I still experience the excitement of holding a new notebook, an unsharpened pencil now (I need a life, I know :>)
The most important thing we needed in our opinion was out assignment book, or planner. (Agenda)

So many types to choose from!
The ones with tons of pictures in them of movie stars and singers were the most popular of course. My own favorites were Cliff Richard and Romy Schneider.

In our best penmanship we would start by filling in our class schedules. Of course as the year went on things got messy.

I totally forgot about "DE ETUI!!" Or in English: the pen/pencil pouch. In my days the etui was something rather special. If you were lucky you would get on for Sinterklaas or your birthday. made of real leather, with a zipper all around it. It would fold open and held all your pens and pencils, your protractor, your compass, your fountain pen,( if you were so lucky to own one)
Of course most of us had the ones that coordinated with your Agenda. But the leather "professional" etuis, smelled so delicious, and made you look and feel so important!

We used to have to cover our books with heavy dark red paper. And like the planners, the first week or so, all our books looked perfect! But then we started doodling, and adding stickers and pictures....until the nuns got tired of it and made us cover them all over again.

I don't recall ever having to schlep a backpack. We had old fashioned attache type cases, mostly out of some sort of vinyl, but sometimes they were leather. We didn't have a lot of heavy books like they do now either. Our classes were very basic:
English, French, German, Math, Dutch, Geography, Biology, History, Algebra and Geometry.
We also had art classes, 'handwerken' (knitting and sewing), music (singing) and gymnastics. But that was it.

It wasn't until 8th grade that we got more fashion conscious and started using "in" wicker baskets and huge straw totes, which were killers on your stockings. But then, so were our stiffly starched petticoats. :>)

When my own kids started school, my weird affliction of drooling over new school stuff went into overdrive.

Just loved getting "the list" and going shopping. Easy with the son, more interesting with Bugs.

Of course.

So there I was, just enjoying watching these moms and their kids getting ready for another school year.

At Staples I noticed an ingenious system. At the front of the store they have this shelve unit with cubby holes for each school and each grade, holding the list for each individual class

Brilliant!

Perhaps this is not something new, but I had never seen that before, and I thought it was very convenient and clever!

So the two of us had a nice leasurely stroll through all the isles, and sipped on a large Carmel Frappuchino (Boo loves the whipped cream)

What diet?

*grin*

In a few years Bugs will be among those moms, with the list in her hand, Boo-boo bugging her for this and that (NO Dora, No Miley! *lol*) just you wait daughter...........

Going through the section where the picture frames are I had a great idea.

When I cleaned out my files at home the other day and when I found the old pictures of Wheelie and his famous people, I also found two pictures of him when he was a runner in high school.
One of them is a unique shot of a group of them running through a meadow in Golden Gate Park, straight through a bunch of sheep!
The other one is a picture of him winning a race, taken at the finish line. That picture appeared in the local newspaper at the time. I've always loved that shot of him straining to get himself over the line.

Wheelie was quite a runner, won races left and right all through school. His mother kept every news paper article, every score. The scrapbooks are in the attic, along with the box of medals.

I am going to make copies of those two pictures to clean them up and brighten them a little, and then I am going to frame them and hang them up!

:>)

And now it's 9pm. The baby has been asleep since before Jeopardy, and I am going to get me a cold bottle of water and crawl into bed with a new book.

SGMKJ!