I can tell it’s time to get ready for the coming school year. My middle schooler posted his supply list as his status update on Facebook last night.

I used to love shopping for back-to-school supplies as a kid. I still love buying new clothes and office supplies for work, just like I enjoy seeing my kids delight in their new outfits and backpacks.

But school shopping for and with kids? Not so much.

My main beef is the supply lists.

First of all, I don’t remember carrying my body weight in school supplies when I showed up at the school door on day one as a child.

Buying a few folders and supplies for each kid would be fun, like buying them toys. (Okay, maybe you don’t think school supplies are as fun as toys, but I do. You should see me at work when they deliver the latest shipment of Federal Supply Service 8” x 10” lined Record Books.)

Buying a year’s worth of school supplies and materials for three children, on the other hand, is time-consuming and expensive. It requires trips to multiple stores, followed by hours of careful unpacking and repacking to give each kid manageable bundles of stuff to take to school on the first day.

My worst experience was the year I decided that I would buy supplies in bulk and turn them all in, in bulk, at the school office. After all, I reasoned, all three of the kids were going to the same school. What reasonable person would expect me to stop in three separate classrooms on the way to work with three separate bags of supplies if they were all going to be in the same supply closet anyway?

That was the year I learned that there was no central supply closet. There followed several embarrassing minutes on the sidewalk in front of the school, haphazardly redistributing supplies among the kids and reassuring them that they would not be late for class on their first day of school.

It dawned on me later that the lack of a central supply closet was also a reflection of the fact that teachers often provide their own supplies for their classrooms, out of their own pockets.

(The PTA at their school sold “back-to-school” kits at the end of the academic year, which would have spared me the horror of supply shopping for two of the three kids. Alas, I missed the deadline to order.)

Second of all, my older two children no longer share my ideas of what back-to-school outfits should look like.

My experiment in turning the boys loose with cash to buy their own clothes at the mall last spring ended badly. The 13-year-old wound up having to exchange a couple of T-shirts he bought with inappropriate messages, while the 11-year-old felt that his fashion needs would best be met with a collection of plastic wristbands.

My 8-year-old daughter still agrees with my fashion choices some of the time, at least for now. But she’ll be starting middle school three years from now.

Maybe next year.