No, this isn’t the usual lame ploy to pretend that it isn’t a bazillion degrees outside or a poor excuse for a summer sale.  It’s kind of how I motivated my boys to dig through their stuff and see it with new eyes.  The allure of summer had been wearing off—the boys have been out of school since a week before Memorial Day.  The older one was begging for a new notebook (apparently the ones with a couple of pages written in them are considered “done”) and the younger piped in saying that he needed a new activity book.  “Need” is such a subjective term.  There are a lot of…