GETTING BACK TO SCHOOL READY

Stationery has to be one of my favourite things! Fresh new pens and coordinating supplies just does wonders for my OCD tendencies! I used to absolutely love doing my back to school stationery shop when I was younger, covering and decorating my books and labelling all my things.

As a mum the actual stationery shop isn’t as much of a highlight anymore but I still get my kicks from decorating Kylan’s new supplies and labelling every little thing of his! A few years ago I did his stationery order via the Office Max system online and it was awesome. Last year I had been given a voucher for somewhere else and so I didn’t do the online order, and I instead spent days and days driving from shop to shop looking for one particular stupid book with specific margins and never ended up finding it. After that less than pleasant experience I decided to go back to the trusty office max site again this year. I sat on the couch watching a movie in my jimmies, chatting with friends and ordering his stationery at 9pm at night. We arrived back from our little New Year getaway to everything we needed waiting for us at the front door. It seriously couldn’t get any easier!

So now the fun part! The decorating!

Prior to Christmas I discovered Avery labels. They kindly sent me some to try and use for Kylan’s back to school supplies and I couldn’t wait to get creative with them. So the other day Kylan and I sat down together and jumped on the Avery website and we played around with a few options for his label designs. We were going to go with one of the template designs but then we started playing around with photos instead. He ended up choosing a photo of himself in his All Blacks shirt and we customised the labels with his name and class subjects for a few of them. It was so easy to do and he loved being included in the whole process. We popped the label sheets in the printer and VOILA! we had customised labels all ready to go right from the comfort of the couch! (I’m sounding like a lazy couch lady who never gets off her bum!)

We created these two types. His fancy oval ones with his picture on them for all his books and folders and some simple rectangle name ones for all his bits and pieces.

I got far too much satisfaction sticking on those lil labels onto every piece of his stationery. It was ten times better than what I have done in previous years where I have sat there with a vivid and hand written his name or initials on everything.

Kylan chose his duroceal from Kmart and I happily sat and covered all his books (even though they were ones that didn’t need covering…I like to still cover them as they take a thrashing all year and its nice to have his stand out easily from the rest of the class.) If you have tried covering books in the past and end up with bubbles all through them I shared this post last year on my method which works every time!

So there we have it! We are all organised and prepped for back to school next week so now all we have to do is sit back, relax and enjoy the last week of holidays together.