By Danni Koko
It’s back to school time, which means stocking up on pencils and dry erase markers, getting into our daily routine of running late for the bus, and my favorite parent activity yet: covering my kids’ workbooks with contact paper.
Oh, contact paper. The clear, clingy sheet of vinyl that’s supposed to prevent workbooks from bending, tearing and spills, August through June. It works pretty well, I suppose, if only I could get it to stay on.
Growing up, I don’t remember contact paper being front and center on the school supply list. I vaguely recall my parents using a blue and white print contact paper to line the shelves of the pantry in our kitchen, but I don’t remember my teachers sending home our workbooks asking for them to be covered in the same material. Maybe my parents took care of that task quietly and I was oblivious. Or maybe we thought it was optional, like bike helmets.
I do, however, remember cutting up brown paper bags to cover my textbooks. I went to Catholic school, so I think the expectation was that we were trying to preserve the textbooks for as long as possible, hopefully so our grandkids could use them. My school life was, I think, a pretty typical Catholic school experience for the early 1990s. Our teachers expected us to clean up our crumbs off the floor with masking tape (we ate lunch at our desks), my religion teacher and my computer teacher were the same person, and my uniform came with a tie that criss-crossed and fastened in the front with a snap. In all seriousness, school was a nice place, and I liked my teachers. In fact, I thought covering textbooks with brown paper bags seemed like kind of a fun challenge every fall. As the school year progressed and the fragile paper corners became worn, we’d layer on packing tape to make the covers last longer. Those brown paper bags had to last the WHOLE year. Waste not, want not.
My kids have been in school for a long time, so I was surprised at myself that I forgot to buy more contact paper for this year’s back-to-school rituals. My kids start school on different days, so Frida and T-Rex were the first to come home with welcome letters and tell-me-about-your-child forms in their backpacks. In addition to the papers in her take-home folder, Frida presented me with a stack of workbooks.
“My teacher says you’re supposed to cover these with contact paper.”
My shoulders slumped. Why had I forgotten this was a thing? This is a thing we do every year.
I suppose I wanted to banish from my mind the contact paper memories of years past. It’s not the teachers’ fault. The problem is my own ineptitude with self-adhesive vinyl.
I did manage to dig up some old contact paper in the basement, so after the kids went to bed, I grabbed scissors and sat down on the family room floor, ready to embark on my annual workbook-covering adventure. My husband wanted to help, so he took one workbook from the pile while I took another. In addition to being kind, I think he wanted to see what all the fuss was about.
I watched as my husband carefully lined up his first workbook on the numbered grid before he measured and cut. I suspect the company that makes this stuff puts the grid on the back to pretend they’re helping you out, as if you don’t have to separately take your own measurements for whatever it is you’re trying to cover.
“Be careful,” I told my husband, “When you peel off the back, the paper tends to curl up.”
He carefully separated the white from the clear sticky side, laid the workbook down… and discovered he had cut the wrong size.
I couldn’t help myself. I started to laugh. Such is the experience of a parent taking the dive into contact paper world.
As we made our way through the pile of workbooks, I began to recall why I had found this such a laborious task in the past.
For one thing, the contact paper comes wrinkled. Why?? It’s so hard to smooth out the grooved lines that run diagonal on that thick material. Can’t the machine make contact paper that’s not wrinkled? I mean, my wrapping paper doesn’t come wrinkled. Messing up a roll of wrapping paper is our job as a family.
And that’s another thing: the contact paper comes in a roll, which means it immediately curls up after you cut it. I try to weigh it down with something heavy like a sturdy tape dispenser, but once the back has been removed, you’re left with the sticky side exposed, and anything you place on it is going to stay stuck. It’s not like I’m going to send my daughter to school with a tape dispenser attached to her handwriting book.
Then as you try to apply half of the contact paper as smoothly as possible to one side of the workbook, the rest of the contact paper clings to everything else around it. I’ve tried cutting smaller pieces and covering the books in segments, but somehow I still manage to get it stuck to everything but the book.
As a newbie, I made the mistake of attempting to cut the exact size of contact paper that I needed. Rookie mistake. I’d cut the contact paper only to realize I was off by an eighth of an inch. So disheartening.
I’ve learned to cut a larger piece than I need, which allows me to wrap it over the edges of the cover and smooth out the remaining contact paper inside the white interior – you know, that first page where our kids write their name and the school year, as if anyone in the future is going to need to look back to ascertain in which calendar year that very workbook was used. Although this new approach requires more cutting around the corners and spine, I can pat myself on the back for having a technique that works for me.
That doesn’t mean I have it all figured out. Every year, I continue to learn from my mistakes. This year, I foolishly left my hair down, and I think it got caught in the contact paper no less than 90 times. Next year, please remind me to wear a ponytail.
Additionally, I made the ill-fated decision to sit on a carpeted floor, which meant all the little pieces of lint from the rug made their way onto the sticky side of the contact paper. I found myself pulling off countless pieces of carpet fuzz, and because the material is clear, it also attracted just about every speck of dust that was in my house. Inevitably, I’m going to send someone to school with an assignment book that looks like it fell into the bottom of the vacuum cleaner bag.
Why as children did we clean up our classroom floors with masking tape? We should have used contact paper!
On Tiny Dancer’s first day of school, we repeated the back-to-school rituals, and she too came home with a backpack full of new items. After getting off the bus, she started to tell me about her day. Then she smirked at me.
“I have workbooks for you to cover,” she smiled.
Normally I have my kids help with chores, but in the case of contact paper, I honestly feel bad making my little crew take on such a self-defeating task.
Luckily, I had just enough contact paper for three more books and bravely took on the task of covering Tiny Dancer’s workbooks on my own. This time, I sat at the kitchen table and worked pretty efficiently with minimal annoyance. I was pretty satisfied with my achievement and started to clean up the supplies.
From afar, I caught a glimpse of the logo on the back of the contact paper roll and thought it was a picture of a snail. Upon closer inspection, I realized it was actually a duck. Too bad. With the pace at which I work, a snail would have been much more fitting. Either way, this roll is pretty much used up. Perhaps next year I will try a different brand.