labor day and boys' labors

We had a great weekend with four families out at our favorite lake.  The weather was a bit cool and breezy, so we didn't do much swimming.  But otherwise it was a classic Labor Day weekend:  lots of sitting around a campfire and talking and laughing, and way too much food.  No matter how well we plan, we always end up with enough food to sink a ship.  Fortunately we adopted four extra teenagers for the last day, because otherwise we would have ended up with a mountain of uneaten food.

Today's topic is boys.  I know several of you have sons, so I'm looking at you.  How do/did you handle school stuff?  Nell was always so excited about buying her school supplies and getting them all labeled and organized.  And I have to admit that she takes after me in that regard.  I adore Staples, Office Depot, and school and office supplies in all their various incarnations.  I have boxes of pens and markers, a shelf full of notebooks, a drawer full of post-it notes, sharpies, staples, various different kinds of binder clips, scissors, three different kinds of tape, glue, etc etc.  I can spend hours searching for exactly the right writing instrument when I begin a new project--which is both the perfect start and the perfect way to procrastinate.

Then there's MadMax.  Other than the fact that he would get in trouble at school, MadMax would not care one whit if all he had in his backpack was a single half-used spiral notebook and a stub of a pencil.  I asked him the week before school started if he wanted to go shopping for school supplies and he looked at me like I had asked him to drink poison.

He came home after the first day of school with syllabi for his various classes, many of which I had to sign and return.  A couple of them had a detailed list of supplies needed:  three red pens, graphing paper, two black dry erase markers, etc. This afternoon I asked him to make a consolidated list that we could take with us to the store, and from the blank look on his face, you would suspect I was speaking Martian.

So I scanned the lists and dictated to him while he wrote things down.  Then I dragged him around with me this afternoon while we went to Target and Staples to make sure he had everything on the list.  We found it all except a compass (for Geometry), which was nowhere to be found the week after everyone else had already done their school supply shopping.  We hope he will not need it for awhile.

I am not one of those hover-y mothers that leans over her children's shoulders while they do their homework and surreptitiously corrects it.  I have helped with school projects, but I have never done one for them.  I have (*clears throat*) allowed them the privilege of getting frustrated and angry and despairing over their homework without bailing them out.  (Not that I never help, but I don't want them to get in the habit of having me sit there with them every minute while they're studying.) 

But I could not leave it up to him to get his school supplies organized, because I knew it wouldn't happen.  So I put the dividers in his math binder, with a section of college-ruled paper and a section of graph paper.  I gathered together the index cards, red pens, and dry erase markers that he needed to hand to his Spanish teacher.

And I can't tell if that's OK, or if I'm just enabling him.  I remember in college smirking at the boys who had never done their own laundry, whose mothers had written their personal essays, who hadn't the faintest idea how to fix their own lunch.  And here I am, raising a boy who is well on his way to being One of Those.  What do you do?  How much do you help?  I suspect I am babying him too much, but I can't quite make myself leave him to his own apathy about this stuff. 

I didn't have brothers, and this was never a problem with Nell.  This is all new to me.  Advice required.