Taking My Victories Where I Can Get 'Em

I TOTALLY WIN at back-to-school supplies.

Aside from new lunch boxes (inevitable) and use-up-ables like pencils, pens, dividers and composition books, the only things I've had to purchase this year were scissors, one new trapper, and a shmancy calculator for my big kid (the hell's a graphing calculator, anyway?). No loose leaf paper, no folders, no binders, no rulers, no compasses, no pencil cases, no glue sticks (ha!). And no branded ANYTHING.

What pushed it over the edge to VICTORY status was the graph paper. Quin's math teacher requires 1/4" graph paper that is pre-punched for a three-ring binder. GUESS WHAT I HAD TUCKED AWAY from like the year that Michael and I were married (1990, for those keeping score)? At some point Michael decided that he needed graph paper so he could obsess unproductively lay out our early "furniture" (using the term as loosely as possible) in our first apartment together. He used exactly one sheet, and in the intervening 18 years the remainder of the package has moved with us from our first apartment to our first house, and then to our second house, where it has since kicked around for seven years.

AND I FOUND IT LAST NIGHT. Yes, I did. And I do not have to go to the store to buy 1/4" graph paper for my 7th grader. And there was much rejoicing.