Typical Nate

I had to take Nate to buy new shoes last night, and the drive to the shoe store was a riot for me. I never know what's going to come out of that kid's mouth. But the most typical, crazy talk of all had to do with math. Nate happens to excel at math. He just "gets it" and constantly amazes me with the computations he can do.

So we're driving along and he asks (now this you'd expect from a Kindergartner) in a whiny voice "When will we get there?" I told him it would take a few minutes. He responded, "So 120 seconds?" I told him no that would be two minutes and I said a few minutes. Few means three or four. His response, "So like 180 seconds then." Well, yes, if it takes three minutes that's right. And I am thinking wow, the kid is bright. Then I asked him, just for kicks, how many seconds it would be if it takes four minutes. He thought for a bit and said, "240." How he does that I have no clue.

We kind of laugh about it. I had to take Ava around delivering girl scout cookies and I joked that I needed to bring Nate along to figure out the change. I was only halfway kidding because Nate really is better at it than Ava or even me most of the time.

I guess some brains are wired to understand math because it's not like we taught him these things. He loves doing multiplication and division and constantly asks me for problems to solve. He does addition and subtraction in his head easily. I'm amazed because math was always a struggle for me. I clearly recall sitting in third grade and not having a clue what the teacher was talking about as she explained math problems. I struggled through high school math classes and took the bare minimum in college. And bless Ava's heart but I see so much of myself in her when it comes to math. She may have a long road ahead of her.

I just find it interesting how we're all so differently programmed to naturally excel at certain things. It makes me curious about why that is and what causes it. Meanwhile, I think I'll start having Nate balance my checkbook. I'm off by about $14 and I can't figure out what I did wrong...