hot trunk, quadruple baked BBQ flavor

I love having my kids to myself.  I love feeling like a family who has time for each other again.  I love the noise, the laughter, the togetherness.  I could move my gang to a deserted island and live quite contentedly until the end of the world.  But alas the public school system has other (more productive) plans for my children.  With the first day of school breathing down my neck I decided it might be a good time to clean out the 2012-2013 back packs.

Graded papers, notes, flash cards, playing cards, bike locks, hall passes, bus passes, broken pencils, candy bar wrappers, dried up pens, sticky notes, scientific calculators, drawings, permissions slips, an unopened birthday invitation from May and every mother's worst fear . . . food.  That's right.  One of the backpacks contained leftover field trip lunch.  (The same backpack that's been stuffed in someone's trunk behind their golf clubs since June.)

We've rearranged schedules, gotten new locker combinations, purchased kleenex, hand sanitizer, dividers, 100 pencils, 3 packs of pens (that will be gone by the 5th week of school) brightly colored notebooks and countless glue sticks.  We've mapped out classrooms and paid a myriad of school fees.

Last on the agenda: School Clothes Shopping.  This is when I eat the 3 month old steamy lunch I just discovered and put myself out of my misery . . .