It never fails. The kids get out of school in June and it feels like there’s so much time to enjoy the summer. We all get used to the slow, lazy days of summer. Around mid-July, I always start to feel like there’s not enough “summer” left. Come August, I’m wondering “where did the summer go?” and this year is no exception.

Here it is just a week before school starts and I have such mixed feelings about it. My youngest will start kindergarten this year. I recently realized that over the past fourteen years, this will be my first year “home alone” during the day. Scary thought. I hope to embrace it and be incredibly productive.

The two weeks before school starts, we always go school supply shopping. The school offers the prepackaged supplies, but in my opinion, that takes the fun out of getting to pick out your own folders, binders and pencils. I’m like a kid in a candy shop when it comes to these things….I absolutely love buying new office/school supplies. I believe I’ve successfully passed down the fascination of buying these things to my girls; my son could really care less.

This weekend is tax-free shopping for school clothes. I was pretty excited to take advantage of this; we headed out Friday anticipating to find a lot of deals. However, I discovered that only about half of the stores we went to actually had a good sale going on. So much for stacking up a sale price along with no tax. We did manage to find some good deals - the best being at Kohls and Old Navy. The kids are now set for school.

So this upcoming week will be all about going to bed and waking up earlier so the first few days of school are less of a shock on the system then they already are.