Annie has discovered numbers beyond 100. She is still working on the patterns of the numbers, and what makes something x hundred whatever. This is further complicated by the microwave, which she enters numbers on when we are cooking/defrosting. Of course, those numbers are in minutes and seconds, even though there is no obvious distinction on the oven. Blast it...

At any rate, for the past couple of weeks, she likes to see what page I'm on in whatever book happens to end up on the nightstand. She intitially would say "two-hundred and twenty-three". This is a common thing for folks to say. Heck, I mess up and do it too, sometimes. But, what better time to break a bad habit. So, I told her "Actually, it's two-hundred twenty-three... no and. When an and shows up in a number it means something else, and we'll cover that later." She accepted this, and has been doing well with it.

She really seems to have an aptitude for math, which makes her engineer-father very happy. She was making complex color-patterns with her fruit snacks before she was four. So, naturally she has some confidence in this area. I shouldn't have been surprised this morning when her teacher approached me with a smile and informed me "thanks, I've been regularly getting in trouble lately". A plethora of fears ran through my mind about what my usually angelic, but some sometimes devilish child may have done. She then explained that Annie is quick to correct her when she uses and in numbers. I was back to being proud. The teacher seemed very pleased with Annie's insistence on the matter, and prophesied that Annie would have her trained by the end of the year. With a quizzical expression she wondered why her fourth-graders hadn't caught and trained her on this...

Expanding polynomials of pride