Back To School Gifts

It is August and I go back to work in less than a week!   Yikes!  There is something so wrong about that!  This being the first summer in about 15 years that I haven't worked makes it even harder to go back for some reason.  Perhaps it has something to do with that little baby that was recently born?  Or that I'm only 2 1/2 years away from full retirement?   Well, regardless, I wanted to get a little something together for my co-workers to celebrate the beginning of another school year.  We are itinerant, so I decided to put together a little "survival kit" that can be kept in our cars.

I bought a bunch of zipper pencil pouches from the back-to-school area of Target and then purchased a number of small items to fill it.  Dollar Tree was a great source for this as well.

Because I wanted to decorate the zipper bags a bit, I added washi tape stripes across the plastic window.

For the last six months or so, I've been breaking my addiction to Diet Coke and replacing it with a new energy drink that I discovered at the Louisiana Marathon called ZipFizz.  It is all natural and contains caffeine, but doesn't have the other bad qualities found in carbonated beverages.   I first began replacing my morning Diet Coke and sometimes my lunch one.  I find that Diet Coke now doesn't quite taste as good to me as it used to, so I don't crave it like before.

Anyway, all that to say that Zipfizz comes in these nifty little plastic tubes.   I've been saving the tubes, because they seem like they could be used for something----just wasn't sure what.  They seal tight and even come in pretty colors.

I dressed them up a bit by adding strips of washi tape to match the zipper pouches.

I filled one of the tubes with paper clips.

In the other, I put a few safety pins.

I'm thinking of adding one more tube for some Tylenol---we all need that from time to time!
Last, I designed and printed out a cute tag.

They are filled, stacked and ready for the first day of school.  I might not be ready to go back, but something cute just might help soften the blow.

Here's what I filled the bags with:

Blue pen (for our IEP's)
Black Sharpie
Mechanical pencil
Pad of Stickie notes
Rubber bands
Roll of tape
Glue Stick
Hand sanitizer
Paper clips (in tube)
Safety pins (in tube)
Tylenol (in tube)

And just in case you're interested in seeing what I put together in previous years, here are a few of ideas:   2013,  2011,  2009.