Mrs Hannigan's Home for Girls

Watching kids learn naturally is one of the most amazing things in the world. Today Gabriella asked how much a plane ticket was. I said about $400. Within minutes she had found several ways to calculate what it would cost for our family to fly somewhere.

We were in the car, so she pointed to each seat and said 4, 8, 12, 16, 20, 24, 28, 32 hundreds, so three thousand two hundred.

There are three seats in the back row and three seats in the middle row and two seats up front, so in our car there’s a seat for each family member. So she added up 1200 in the back row, 1200 in the middle row and 800 in the front row. the two 12’s make 24 and 6 more would be 30 with 2 leftover from the 8 so that’s 3200

Since there are 8 of us, she decided to add eight 400 times, but that would be way too complicated, so she just added 800 four times and got 3200.

In the end, she said “figuring things out like that is like addictive. No matter how many ways I think of it it comes out the same. Try it, mom. So we experimented with a few more ways to figure out $400×8.

And this was all within a fifteen minute time period. She also calculated how much we’d pay for ice cream for our whole carload, at 50 cents each. When the total came and it was different than she expected, she figured out the tax percentage based upon the new total.

It was $2.50 for the ice cream and 21 cents for the tax, so each dollar must have a little more than 8 cents tax because we have two and a half dollars so that’s like five halves and each halfdollar would take up four cents so there would be 8 cents for every dollar which is 8 percent, but there’s still that penny leftover. Is there something smaller than a penny? “Only in taxes,” I tell her.

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Discovery Health recently aired a special called “Radical Parenting” where they profiled three “extreme” families. One was an Attachment parenting mom, who spoke about extended nursing, co-sleeping and elimination communication. Another was a feminist mom who took care not to expose her sons to the idea that toys, clothes and colors had sexual connotations. [...]

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I’m number 15. See,

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Imagine that. I’m not sure what the point of it all is, but 15 out of a gazillionty is really good. I think I’ll celebrate. Anyone wanna run circles in the yard with me while the kids chase us? Didn’t think so.

If deep [...]

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Dear kids
Sorry I suck
Sorry I’m not the sparkly mom who wears makeup and jewelry all the time, even though you’re so good about giving me pretty things, I rarely decorate myself. Sorry about that.
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Because honestly I just want to talk about the calendar I bought. I feel like my blog is somehow related to my calendar now because of what happened last year and everything.
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I have a new little buddy, he’s a monster. See him in my sidebar? Here he is, below, in case you’re an email subscriber:

Isn’t he cute?
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