Holy Fishsticks, Batman! Math fun in the car

We've been in the car all day today. Left Cathy's house this morning around 9:30 after lots of hugs and discussions about Cathy wanting to help me get packed to leave, but also wanting to hide my bags so I couldn't go :) We had a great time and got to spoil a friend and meet a brand spankin' new baby ... But today was the day we packed up and began our journey home.

We stopped for a couple hours in Springfield to have lunch with my BIL. The kids had a great time looking for their cats, playing with the dog, meeting the horses, and playing hide-and-seek with their Uncle Mike. Eventually, though, it was time for us to head out. I'd planned to make it to Red Bluff and had already booked a room there. That's 5.5 hours from Springfield, and by the time we pulled out of their driveway it was a few minutes after 3. Yikes!

Dusk found us in the mountains, in the rain. Nice combination, yes? No, not really. But that wasn't all that Nature had to throw at us. At the very top of the mountain pass between Ashland OR and the CA border we hit SNOW. The ground was too wet for it to stick, but the air was filled with flurries of flakes that melted as soon as they touched down. Once we began the descent on the southern side of the mountains we were quickly back to rain, and then, *right at* the CA border the rain stopped. Within another 10 miles the skies had opened up and you could see the moon and sky behind the clouds. I guess OR is hogging the clouds and rain.

When we reached Yreka we pulled off to stop at the Denny's we've eaten at on other drives to-and-from Oregon. Turns out it's closed. But Sayer decided that she wasn't really hungry, just bored, so she was willing to keep driving to find another Denny's rather than settling for anything else in Yreka. Yes, they like Denny's that much. And no, Duncan didn't get a vote. He'd insisted on getting a hot dog at the Costco in Medford when we'd stopped for gas, then gone in to use the restrooms. So by the time we were trying to stop at Denny's he'd already eaten.

Not long after the failed stop in Yreka, Duncan fell asleep. Sayer and I had been discussing the plot twists and prophesies in the last Percy Jackson novel, but now, as we drove along looking for signs of a Denny's, she asked if we could play math games. Really?! Cool! Sure we can :) (See, this post really will have math stuff in it! :)

So we started out with me asking her to add 2 plus 6, then 8 plus 4, then 12 minus 3, then 9 times 2 ... After a while I introduced the concept of division. I'd ask her how many groups of two there were in 12, then take the answer and roll it back into the rhythm of 6 plus 7, 13 plus 13, 26 minus 16, 10 times 4 ...

Some of our addition problems included carrying over. That part she got just fine, but she had some troubles lining up her ones and tens columns given that we were doing all of this without paper so she had to visualize it all in her head. She was doing a fantabulous job with it all.

I told her about a couple fun 'rules' of multiplication: any number times 1 always equals itself; any number times 0 is always 0; the digits in the answer for multiples of nine always sum to 9 ... that last one will need repeating, but she picked up on the first two immediately.

At one point I asked her if she could divide 30 by 5 for me. I told her it would be a harder one and began to set it up for her, but she interrupted and told me it was easy. The answer was 6.

I was flabbergasted. Why, yes, it is 6, but how did you know that? How did you figure it out? And so fast!?

She said it was easy. Thirty is 3 tens, and each ten has 2 fives, so it was 2 times 3 so the answer was six.

Did I mention that I was flabbergasted? I was handing her a division problem and she was solving it easily by using multiplication all in her head. Whoa!

So I asked her if she could apply her shortcut to finding out the answer to 60 divided by 5. It took her all of about 43 seconds to tell me the answer was 12. And I could hear the HUGE GRIN on her face as she said it. I was so impressed and she knew it and it was making her so happy and me so happy :)

We kept up the math games for about 45 minutes, until we got to Redding. After that we started looking again for Denny's (there was one, but we were *so* close to Red Bluff, where I knew there was another Denny's, and Duncan was still sleeping ... I was glad that she didn't see it). And I kept Sayer in stitches by singing to her about how hot and uncomfortable my feet were and how painfully full my bladder was. It was a great song :) Lasted all the way to Red Bluff and included a lot of howling. I kinda really had to pee, badly! At one point I interrupted myself singing to talk with Sayer about caffeine and it's effects stimulating the brain and helping me to stay awake, and making the kidney's extract more water from the body and thus making one need to urinate more. Seemed rather apropros ...