Boy, 3.5, stumps mother at math

We are under yet another rainfall warning right now. And this week I'm downtown at a course all the latter half of the week, which means that at 4pm class close I'm sitting, half off my chair, coat on, bag packed, ready to dash out the door, down the stairs, down the block, around the corner, up two flights in the parkade to my car, to take it all the way across downtown in the dark and the rain at the start of rush hour and then across town to the Workplace and daycare to get the kiddo.

This is all after spending seven hours in a room lit only by fluorescent lights having a power point presentation which only tangentially relates to what I do for a living read at me.

I say this only because I'd like to explain my frame of mind for the conversation ahead, in the hopes that my math inadequacy will be almost excusable.

So post pick up, my child is in the back seat chatting away. Me, I'm negotiating yet more wet rainy dark roads, and the traffic that all wants to leave Workplace and daycare, and the lights and the cyclist and basically the insanity. And I hear from the back:

"One ten is ten! and then TWO tens are ....

...

....

twenty!"

And then:

"Mommy, what's FIVE tens??!"

"Fifty" I reply. And we discuss how two tens is twenty, which he knew, and then three tens is thirty and four tens is forty and so five is fifty. He thinks this is all HILARIOUS, for some reason. And then asks:

"Mommy, what's TEN tens??"

"That's ONE HUNDRED!" I reply. "Isn't that great?!"

He agrees that this is pretty neat, but then like all kids he wants to move on to something bigger and better.

"Mommy, what's ONE HUNDRED TENS??!!"

And I say ....

yes, it's true. I pause. I can't think. And I actually think to myself "I know what ten one-hundreds is. Is that the same??!"

I feel like I should be admitting at this point that I drool and don't actually work as a writer; in fact I don't have a post-graduate degree because hello! how can they grant a post-graduate degree to someone SO DAMN STUPID.

Eventually I cough out that one hundred tens is 1,000. "A one with THREE ZEROS! Isn't that great?!"

He agrees. And now that I'm more confident, we go into what 300 tens are, and so forth until we get home.

But MY GOD, this is pretty damn pathetic. And what's even more pathetic?

I did 100 10s on my computer calculator before I posted this just to make DAMN SURE that I was right.