Supplies

I just spent my precious cup-of-tea-and-Internet time labelling 48 crayons, 24 no. 2 pencils, 8 markers, 8 glue-sticks, and two pairs of safety scissors with my son's name.

This part of preparation for kindergarden is new to me. I hope I've done it right.

In Ireland, we got, as I assume students still do, a list of books to be bought at the start of the year. Everyone had their own pencil case with a couple of pencils, an eraser (or ten, depending on whether there was at the time a craze for scented erasers - or smelly rubbers, as we call them, no doubt to the amusement of my American readers), a pencil sharpener (again, something Americans don't need - classrooms have those terrifying electric ones that look like they're just waiting to eat a finger), and a ruler. We also had our own copybooks (soft-covered exercise books, or composition books, I suppose you'd call them).

Over here, the books are provided by the school, but the children bring in not only all the pencils, crayons, and markers they might need during the year, but also extras like boxes of tissues and ziploc bags and copy paper, for general school use. I suppose it comes to the same thing, but it's just the first of many ways, I'm sure, in which school here is all new territory to me. I asked the Internet how I should label the supplies. Google told me to use a Sharpie marker and labels, and to mark each item - every last pencil and crayon. I used a ballpoint pen and I cut my big sticky labels up into as many pieces as I could fit his name onto. I hope that's okay.

I used to get a new pencil case from Santa in my stocking every year. I didn't mind starting the new year in September with last year's ratty and doodled-on pencil case, because I knew that in January I'd come back from the holidays with a lovely clean one. But it's the memory of my copybook covers that is really what made me want to get this vital introductory step right for Monkey.

Many people's parents would lovingly cover their schoolbooks, and even their copybooks, with brown paper, in an effort to keep them cleaner and make them hang together a bit longer during the long terms of being slung in and out of a schoolbag on a daily basis. As I grew older, the really lucky kids had their books covered with clear sticky plastic, making them extra durable and also attractive, because you could still see the original, like-new, cover. Brown paper, though, was classic, and clean, and would never get you into trouble. My best friend's books were covered with brown paper. My books were not.

Most years, my books paraded a colourful and sometimes seasonal selection of used wrapping paper, with tiny tags of old sticky tape left here and there to betray an earlier, more temporary, vocation. I was probably not the only child in recession-hit 1980s Ireland whose parents had thought of this. One year, however, and maybe things were especially tight that particular August - though I have a feeling it was just my parents' habitual frugality - I distinctly remember going to school with all my copybooks covered in the sort of waxy paper that came around loaves of bread. Johnston Mooney and O'Brien Wholemeal, to be exact: still the bread of choice in my house. The wrapper has changed now, but the particular pattern of beige and white with big, unmistakeable logos, that graced all twenty or so of my copies that term is seared by the flames of mortification onto the little grey cells of my memory.

I also seem to remember having flock wallpaper on some of my books that year - some sort of raised paisley pattern in cream. Sturdy and hardwearing protection for the rough-and-tumble life of a history textbook - and very tasteful, in the 70's, whence no doubt it came.

That must have been the nadir in terms of book coverings, and the following year I demanded that for my entry to secondary school there must be no  more of this recycled nonsense. I took my father to the homewares store and pointed to the clear plastic stuff that would show I too was a person of taste and discernment. I was, no doubt, the envy of all. At least I knew there was one fewer thing to set me apart from the crowd, and when you're 12 in a new school, that's all that matters.

So, with all that still fresh in my mind, I hope that I got Monkey's labelling right first time.