Anne Rogers wrote:
If you want to get stressed, I have a good recipe...

...try to get school supplies on the evening before school starts!

I was in Tescos yesterday, and that was full of stressed out parents
trying to get stuff before school starts today.

[snip]
So off I go tonight to the local big supermarket, which is sold out of
almost everything I need, erasers of any colour were an empty section of
shelving, let alone getting the specified pink one (and why to you have
to get pink anyway - friends have told me that it's always been this way
and some of them started school 40+ years ago!). To make matters worse
having remembered to take the list with me, it somehow managed to escape
from the trolley between the entrance and school supplies aisle, so I
don't even have a difinitive list of what I'm trying to buy!

At secondary, Kiddo needed a specified calculator, but that was so the
teachers knew how it operated. Apart from that they are fairly lax.
Maybe it is because we have school uniforms, and teachers are used to
the slight variations between brands of white shirts etc.

[snip]
(transparent, gift wrap and magic). I can't claim us brits are any
better as we would likely say sellotape, which is also a brand name, to
mean any kind of tape, but then I've never seen such a prescriptive
school supplies list in the UK, so it probably matters less!
[snip]

I think there are always some things specific to schools. For instance,
when my eldest started at school, we were just told a plain t-shirt for
PE. At the end-of-year sports day, I found out that they would also
need a plain t-shirt in house colours for the games. If you had been to
the school (a significant number of parents had), or had older kids
there, you knew about this already. If this was your first child, you
didn't know until a few days before the games.

How about this for pressu J needs a red school sweatshirt. They
changed the design, and the new designs weren't going to be available
until yesterday. The suppliers hadn't sent any! New sweatshirts not
available until the morning that school started. Luckily she still
fitted into the old one...

--
Penny Gaines
UK mum to three