Thursday, April 12, 2007

Add it Up

My son is fixated with numbers. Last weekend he counted to over 1,000 while in the back seat of the car. in case you are wondering how far you might have to travel in order to count to 1,000 yourself, we drove round trip to Sandwich on Saturday and to Woods Hole and back on Sunday. He counted to 1,125 to be precise. I know this not just because I was there, but because he told everyone about it for the next week. "Did you know I could count that high," he asked his father, his grandfather, his grandmother, and anyone else who would listen.
When he's not counting he's in the back seat calling out random strings of numbers and asking me, "what number is that?" or surmising different measurements or weights, as in, "I think our house weights ninety-hundred," or "the hallway is about 100-feet, don't you think?"
Sometimes he'll tax my math skills by asking me to add things exponentially. He'll start with "what's two plus two," then four plus four, eight plus eight, and so on until I tell him I need a piece of paper in order to keep going and he can't understand why I'm stopping since he knows that numbers go all the way up to past one million.
And to think, I once considered majoring in math. If it hadn't been for word problems perhaps I would have.

song: Add it Up • artist: The Violent Femmes

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