"Math class is hard." -- Barbie

(Seriously, would anyone even remember Voice Chip Barbie said that twenty years ago if people hadn't raised such a ruckus about it being anti-feminist? Thanks to the news stories and protests and threats of boycotts, I will go to my grave knowing that Barbie once thought math class was hard rather than letting the doll fall into the nameless morass of theme Barbies with Golden Dreams Barbie, Peaches n' Cream Barbie, Sun-Lovin' Malibu Barbie, and the rest.)

Thursday is math day at our house, and I have to admit we're making some progress. (I used to think math would kill the both of us, but now I think grammar might.) Faith can go through her addition & subtraction fact flashcards only missing two or three, and she knows how to carry and borrow from the upper places. She has a Barbie-worthy block, however, with money. I keep telling her that money is just numbers that you add and subtract like any other numbers, but she keeps convincing herself that 'money is hard,' which dissuades her from approaching it with enough confindence.

Eric, on the other hand, loves his math workbook, a fact which I attribute not to gender differences but to the fact that he's still at the crayon-intensive stage of math, where he's coloring the kites yellow because there are three of them and only two yo-yos so it's the larger group.