This back to school season will be a whole new experience for me. First I will be walking through the doors of a school, not as a student or a reporter, but as a teacher.

It is as exciting a thought as it is nerve wracking. There is so much more that goes into preparing a classroom and preparing your lessons than one would think. I have spent so much time collecting supplies and building my classroom library. What I am most exciting excited about, though, is encouraging my students to read.

I think it will take me a while to adjust to being called Mrs. McClung. To me Mrs. McClung, is Vickie McClung, the THS FCCLA teacher.

More stressing this month is my baby girl, Leah, will be a Cedar Park kindergartener. I am taking this very hard. I am sure she will do great, but I'm still a tad apprehensive about sending her off to school.

I never knew how much it took to get a child ready for school. First we got her school supply list and dutifully purchased every item. For just a kindergartener we spent approximately $40. I was shocked. I am sure there are some parents out there who don't have an extra $40 for school supplies. I can only imagine how expensive it would be if you had multiple kids in school.

Then it was on to school clothes shopping, for Leah and me. My mother went with us on this excursion. Leah's idea of what she wanted to pick out wasn't the same as mine. I wanted her to try on jeans and basics we could add to and she only wanted to look at pajamas and clothes with horses on them. It took me and my mother several tries to convince her she wouldn't be able to wear pajamas to school.

It was an experience. Leah was good, she just wasn't always cooperative and didn't find schlepping from store to store very much fun, when she knew a playground was just down the mall. And saying, "oh we'll go play when we are done shopping," isn't really much of an incentive because she couldn't care less about what she would get to do later, she wanted to play then. But we made it through the day.

I never knew how much went into just getting kids, parents and teacher ready for and into the school doors on the first day.