School is starting soon, and as a parent, you have a lot to do before it starts, in case you thought you could just spend these two weeks going on vacation. But at least you can rest assured that once your kids start school, it will be smooth sailing for about 10 months, with zero responsibilities and no calls from the school about, for example, your kid not already knowing the stuff that they’re supposed to be teaching him. So let’s get this over with:

Firstly, you have to go to the store to buy enough school supplies for the entire year in one go. You want your kid to come in on the first day with a huge stack of graph paper he’s not going to need until Chanukah.

The only place it really makes sense to ask for all the supplies up front is high schools. I know this because I attempt to teach in a high school, and my students show up on the first day without pens. And I’m like, “You couldn’t figure out that you would need pens after 10 years of going to school?”

So on the first day every year, I say, “Okay, you need to bring in pens.” And sure enough, the next day, they still don’t have pens. Because they dorm. They don’t go home every night. Where are they getting pens? If someone doesn’t have a pen today, he’s not going to have a pen that whole month. He’s not leaving during supper to run out and buy pens. And especially not with the money his parents gave him to buy food in case the yeshiva meals they already spent their money on aren’t good enough for his sophisticated palate that sometimes will make grilled cheese with an iron and eat it off a textbook.

So I say, “Okay, well at least when you go home for the off-Shabbos, bring back a pen.” And then he comes back the next week and says, “Oh, I forgot.” How’s he supposed to remember? Should he write it down? He doesn’t have a pen!

You also want to make sure that your kids have enough clothes for the entire year. Because even though your child fit into the same clothes for 10 months, you take them off for two months and suddenly they’re too small. Maybe it’s all the sunlight that’s making him grow in the summer. Either way, put him in a little room with 20 other kids for 10 months, and he won’t grow as much. Like goldfish.

You also have to buy your kids shoes. You encourage your kids to run around in the summer, but it turns out that running around kills shoes. And you have to go to a kids’ shoe store, and those are the worst. There are shoes all over the floor, which is every parent’s nightmare. Someone is always screaming, and one child is standing on top of the shelves, trying on the single shoes. And you have to keep stepping over parents on the ground.

And you can’t just start putting shoes on them. You have to get the kids’ feet measured professionally with one of those metal things that hurts when you drop it on your toe. So first you have to wait for the professional teenager who works in the store to measure each kid’s feet and tell you what size he is so you can request a slightly bigger size so he has something to grow into, because you don’t want to come back here in 3 months. The guy will insist that you get the size that the device says, in part because he wants to sell you more shoes later, and in part because he didn’t go to foot-measuring school to be questioned by a parent whose child was wearing his shoes on the wrong feet.

And then there are nit checks. As far as I know, kids can pick up nits at any point of the year, but let’s do the bulk of our checking at the end of the summer. Where are they getting nits from in the summer? Sleepaway camp? Sleepaway camp! The schools assume these sleepaway camps are infested with nits. The summer I was in sleepaway camp, there were no nits, but we did have a skunk problem. So make sure to get your kids checked for skunks.

If you want to make absolutely sure your kids have no lice, you can get some prescription shampoo, which is really easy to obtain. You don’t even have to go in to the doctor. You call the doctor and say, “I think my kid might have lice. Should I come in?” and he’ll automatically write you a prescription.

Because there’s no way the school checks are thorough. You stand on long lines consisting of every child in the entire school, and when you get to the front, someone spends literally 10 seconds on your child and then signs a form. There’s no way she’s checking between every single hair. So my guess is that with nits, they’re either nowhere or they’re everywhere. There’s no such thing as a small lice community hiding out in the corner of your head. If they move in, they move in with enough friends to start their own country with its own system of government and road construction and a sanitation system, committees to prevent deforestation, and even a president who denies deforestation and keeps promising he’s going to make your head great again. It’s not like a few lice who want to live in a nice, quiet area away from it all with a couple of kids and a dog. They have a ton of kids and a school system, with parents running around and buying school supplies and clothes and shoes, and each kid needs three pairs of shoes, and they all have to match. So what are you complaining about?

By Mordechai Schmutter

Mordechai Schmutter is a freelance writer and a humor columnist for Hamodia and other magazines. He also has six books out and does stand-up comedy. You can contact him at [email protected].