This was the first weekend we’d all be home with nothing in particular to do since June, I think. It was rather nice, even though I spent the vast majority of Sunday afternoon sitting at our local urgent care facility, waiting for a doctor to see whether my bronchitis had transformed itself into pneumonia. (It had not. Hooray! And please, bronchitis, go away already! Three weeks is sufficient!)
After I got home from urgent care, I made a blueberry upside-down cake. It was delicious and definitely worth clicking that link to get the recipe.
Monday: Velveeta Helper
OK, some people might argue that Velveeta Cheesey Skillets are a perfect embodiment of everything that’s wrong with modern society. I bought a box in a moment of weakness a few months back, though, and it was good. Great, even. Some days you just need a little partially hydrogenated this and that in your life. (OK fine maybe you don’t but today I do.)
Tuesday: Chicken sandwiches
Rockford’s birthday is tomorrow, and he requested grilled chicken sandwiches, corn on the cob and “skillet fries.” By which I hope he meant something like these skillet-fried potatoes, because that’s what I’m making.
I have a bottle of marinara at the ready, but I’m hoping to have enough tomatoes in the garden to turn them into a sauce. (And also enough gumption. That’s an important ingredient.)
A lot of people I love dearly don’t share my political beliefs. I’m OK with that, mostly. There are some topics I just don’t discuss with them, though, because I feel very strongly about them and I don’t like arguing with the people I love and, frankly, I don’t want to know how they really and truly feel about some things because I don’t want it to affect my opinion of them.
My dad usually picked me up for the summer a few days after school ended for the year — I still remember the day he picked me up at school on the last day; totally awesome — and he brought me back home just a few days before the next school year started. It meant that I got to spend nearly every possible day of the summer with Dad, but it also meant that I usually went more than two months without much contact with my friends. This was in the Dark Ages, before Facebook and Twitter were around to give us the opportunity to give one another very important updates on, say, lunch or that cute boy at the mall.
Judging by Melissa’s get-up, this was backstage at “Bye-Bye Birdie,” which would make it my junior year in high school (1994-95). The babe in the Roxette shirt is Stephanie, who dug this gem up from the archives.
So the first day of school for me was always exciting. It was a chance to find out what my friends had done over the summer. To see who’d gotten their braces off or who’d had them put on. To see who’d finally had a growth spurt. To see who’d become Totally Cute and to check out the Totally Cute New Kid. It was the day you found out who was in all of your classes and who had the locker next to yours. If you were lucky, it was either the Totally Cute New Kid or the kid who’d become Totally Cute over the summer.
But that wasn’t the only reason I loved the first day of school. Beyond my obsession with cute boys, there was my abiding love of office supplies. The No. 2 pencils sharpened to a deadly point, the plasticky sharp smell of a brand-spankin’-new Trapper Keeper, the notebook paper unmarred by even a solitary mark? Be still my heart. Uncapping a good pen for the first time can still make my day a little bit brighter.
Yep. I’ve always been this nerdy.
Marching band practice with Heather. This is probably also from junior year, and it’s also presented courtesy of Steph.
My kids are homeschooled, so they don’t have that definitive First Day of School to look forward to, and we don’t do a big shopping trip for new school clothes or to gather new school supplies.
(We do, however, order new curriculum. And the day the UPS guy shows up with the new stuff? Christmas in July. Poppy’s new math workbook got here yesterday, and she immediately stretched out in the floor to knock out some arithmetic. The nerd, as they say, doesn’t fall far from the nerdery.)
These days we really wouldn’t need to go out for a big shopping trip even if we weren’t homeschoolers. The internet makes it pretty simple to get a hold of whatever you need without leaving your couch. This is one of my favorite things about the internet in general; I like my couch and am generally loathe to leave it.
And Imma let me finish but hold the phone there’s a Doctor Who lunchbox set available. It looks kinda small, but I’ll bet you could fit a whole lunchroom’s worth of PB&Js in there.
In addition to being your source for awesome lunchboxes, eBay has a couple of neat back-to-school promotions coming up:
eBay is hosting a Back-to-School Twitter party from 3-5pm EST on August 14th, when they’ll be talking about ways to take the stress out of going back to school. Go to ebay.com/schoolparty to RSVP!
This compensated post is part of a Splash Creative Media campaign on behalf of eBay. Opinions within remain 100 percent Nichole’s own. Especially the part about the thrill of the Trapper Keeper.
