with apologies to Miss Kelton, Miss Rolfe, Mr Ware and Mrs McSweeney.
It's no real secret that Ladybaby is a little clone of her mother. House too quiet? She'll be curled up somewhere with her latest book. Sleeping upside down in her bed? She's worried the fan will come off its moorings in the night and figures that her legs could withstand the damage better than her face. Can't sleep at night? Curl up on Mum and Dad's floor and watch their DVD until she goes off to sleep again. (It's ok...it's Apollo 13 at the moment so nothing unsuitable.)
Clone of her mother much? Mmmmm.
If that was all, it'd be fine, but alas, no, it isn't.
In my darlingly precious Ladybaby I have met my mathematical nemesis. I am being punished in the next generation for the grey hair I inflicted on the last. There are simply not words to describe how awesomely difficult it is to get mathematical concepts into that beautiful little mind. A little lady who throws around words like diabolical and succulent, who discusses politics and religion with ease and understands anything to do with language almost instantly cannot remember that when a question contains the word "more" you use addition, and when it contains the word "less" it's a subtraction question. It has taken us four days to do four pages of almost identical questions based around less and more in her maths workbook. It takes, on average, half an hour per page or 7.5 minutes per question. The questions aren't difficult. Tony has 10 stickers and Sarah has 8 more. How many stickers does Sarah have? That sort of question.
Today, bless them, the book people decided to make a slightly more complicated question to challenge the maths brainiacs that use the book. Someone's got this number of ribbons. X are red ribbons, some number more are blue ribbons. There are y fewer green ribbons than red ribbons and all the rest are yellow. How many yellow ribbons does she have?
Oh, spare me. It took 15 minutes to laboriously tease out the answer. Fifteen long, long, long minutes. I should be getting the dinner right now, but I have to debrief first. My psyche is a bit fragile right now.
The one thing she does have going for her is something I didn't acquire until much later in life and that is the ability to remember a few immutable mathematical facts, to wit 10-1=9, and 5+3=8 and so on. She's memorised quite a few of these number facts and they do reduce the stress levels a bit, but OH, MY, GOODNESS...my match, met it is.
It's just like teaching me and it's very, very scary.
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