Well, it's back-to-school season again, and parents across the country know what that means:

It's time to download some new apps.

Yes, you already have 10 apps; that's true. There's one for the park district, one for summer camp, one for your oldest kid's teacher to post weekly updates, one for your youngest kid's teacher to post weekly updates, one for the PTA to inform you of another request for a "suggested donation," one for fuzzy pictures of children's backs as they color, one for grades with a dropdown menu written in Cuneiform, one for a fifth grade parent chat that lately has focused mostly on lost cats, one for school Halloween party pin-the-teeth-on-the-vampire game signups and a final app called Scrooblees — where the school puts all the vital information about registration, bus services, lunch menus and calendars — that you can never find the password for.

But that is not enough apps.

It is never enough apps.

I don't know what teachers and school administrators do during summer break these days, but I imagine a great deal of their work time is devoted to investigating new apps for parents to download. They must curate a giant list of apps, thousands of them, on a separate app called AppLister, just waiting to take the place of the apps the school used last year. They have to feed the beast somehow. The app uptake-update-abandonment cycle runs at a dizzying pace these days, and administrators can't afford for parents to get too familiar with one app before they have to move on to the next in line.

It's much better, I suppose, for your kids to wake up late on a Monday morning and sleepily tell you over their corn flakes, "Hey mom, I forgot to tell you, but my teacher said she posted an assignment on BananaGloop last week, so now I have 30 minutes to finish a project on the Central American Red-Eyed Tree Frog that's due today. And, oh yeah, I need green glitter posterboard and 36 different colors of puff paint for it."

It keeps us on our toes — the drives at midnight to the only 24-hour Walgreens in the tristate area for art supplies — and sharpens our parenting skills as a whetstone does a blade.

As the parent of a school-age child, roughly 95% of the internal memory on your cell phone will be devoted to apps. You'll occasionally need to decide whether to get a necessary app for your kids' schoolwork or keep the videos you took of their first day home from the hospital.

The screen on your phone will become a map of red activity alerts, numerically on par with the individual islands in the nation of Indonesia.

You will, however, always need to download just one more.

A couple of months ago, I got an email about one of the new apps I will need to download for my son, who is just starting middle school.

Fine, I thought.

I've been trained well. I don't even argue anymore.

But wait, I learned, not only do I need to download an app; I need to be trained on the app.

I dutifully signed up for the required training, admittedly a little nervous envisioning an app that requires scholastic instruction prior to use. But I couldn't say no to the training. It would then be my fault if there was a two-hour-turnaround on a permission slip to go on the one field trip that my kid actually wants to go on and I missed the deadline.

"Sorry, son," I'd have to tell him, "but Mommy couldn't figure out how to open Bliggety-Blap, so you won't be going to the bubble gum factory with the rest of the sixth graders this year. Maybe one of your friends can take a picture of the bubble-blowing competition at the end of the tour and show it to you when they get back."

The day of the training, a few hours before go time, I was simultaneously worried and relieved to find out that the school had canceled the session. I could only assume that the administrators had just learned that a new "teacher-approved" app had been released for iPhones and they'd rushed off to check it out.

I would enter the school year untrained on the app, for good or for ill.

My only consolation was the knowledge that, as sure as the sun would rise like a glowing ball of flame in the east and then set afterward in the west, there would be another app.

All I need to do is wait.

Photo credit: William Hook at Unsplash