Real Life Math (Fenced in, Part 2)

Remember the chicken wire issue from a couple posts ago? Here's a word problem:

MamaTea needs 75 feet of chicken wire for her bottom garden, so as to deter the geese from sneaking in. It needs to be at least 14 inches high so it can be attached to the first rail of the fence. And it needs to not take every last bit of her pocketbook, since groceries are always nice to have before the garden starts earning its keep.

In the absence of free/reuseable chicken wire, MamaTea finds the store that sells it cheapest. 24 inch tall x 25 feet long sections for $14.99. Iggy and Ookster point out the 36 inch tall x 50 foot sections that are $24.99.

Here is the question. How does MamaTea get more than 75 feet of fencing for $25?



Give up?




You buy the 36 inch tall x 50 foot section. You cut it in half at 25 feet, and you cut both 25 feet sections in half the long way (at 18 inches tall)...as we are demonstrating in the picture above. And there you have it: 100 feet of 18 inch high fencing for $25. Thanks to Dad for assisting me (who happened to walk through the yard at the wrong time) with the tangly mess.



And there you have it. Another example of real life math :) Hubster says the fence looks even more redneck now. Aww...ain't that sweet?

A dirty bathtub means "great day".

At our house, one way to measure the success of the day is by seeing how dirty the bathtub is after the boys are done taking a bath. Let me tell you, today was an awesome day. Filthy bathtub, happy boys. I'm not sure what was so exciting about ripping around in the dirt/mud/sand/grass/etc. today, but the boys did it and had a fabulous time. Totally one with the earth, I tell ya.

Today's (non-dirt) adventures included a quick shopping trip where it was once again demonstrated that $3 will not buy as many toys at Walmart as it will at a garage sale. Why not? Well, let me explain it to you right here next to the Transformers action figures and the nice Wal-mart employee who is giggling at my speech.

Another adventure included our daily game of badminton, and figuring out that badminton rackets purchased at a garage sale aren't going to last us through this season because someone else has already whipped the crap out of them. Save money and compromise quality? Spend more on something that might last longer? Such lovely life lessons we are learning.

We also experimented a bit in the kitchen, mixing up a batch of puppy chow (you know, rice chex, PB, chocolate, powdered sugar...) and then Iggy suggested we put it in the freezer. Sure. Why not? Well, guess what? Experiment a success. Frozen puppy chow "tastes a miracle", which is the highest compliment Iggy and Ooky can give to anyone about their cooking.

Last but not least, we played another round of our favorite dessert game called Sweet 100. A yours truly invented game which requires a 1-100 chart (we have a large laminated one we found at a garage sale for a dime), some candy, a die, and some place markers. This is how you play: Mama lays the 100 chart on the floor (ours is 1-10, next line 11-20, and so on). Mama puts a small candy (M&Ms, Mike & Ikes, Smarties, etc.) on each number. Iggy and Ooky take turns rolling our (10 sided) die and move the number of spaces as detemined by the die. They can't take the candy unless they can identify the number they have landed on. Who knew that four year old Ooky had any clue what 86 or 57 or 39 were? Certainly not his mother. (Well, now she does...)I guess I'd never really asked him. The ultra cool thing was now that I am pretty sure they are pretty solid on identifying their numbers up to 100, I explained to them that they can figure out numbers all the way to 1000 now, since putting a 1 in front of 86 makes it... (and Iggy says " One hundred and eighty six!") Let's be tricky and make it a 2 in front of 86... (and Iggy says "Two hundred and eighty six!") and then I look over and Ooky has taken his dry erase board off the wall and is writing number and after number after number. Where the heck did all this come from??

Camera is working!!

Well...if you can't tell, we finally got the camera to work with our computer, so I'm slowly adding pictures to my blogs to make them just that more exciting. And, if you also can't tell, I love taking pictures of my kids.

Hubster is home and so its been ultra-relaxed around here. We had a campfire last night and Iggy did a whole impromptu spelling bee thing - which made me giggle, because Hubster and I watched a hilarious Youtube spoof on homeschoolers and how they are going to take over the world, one spelling bee at a time...Anyhow, spelling bee was followed by a late night dead-animal-remains-identification-quiz, as we kept finding...well, dead animal remains. We have four outside cats here who take it upon themselves to rid our 13 acres of woods/creek of rodents...and we sometimes come upon...well, you get the idea. Good backwoods fun.

We made a new recipe (Caramel French Toast) for supper (I'm assuming we aren't the only people who eat breakfast type foods for supper) and Ooky helped me put it together. He was the egg cracker. I got out the carton of eggs and told him he had to crack five...but one at a time into a bowl. So he gets through two of them, and I was thinking outloud and said "How many more do you have left to crack?" And he says "Three." But dangit, how did he know that when he had a whole dozen in front of him? Was the kid doing (gasp) math?? (Big smile from mom, who is always amazed that the crazy insane full of energy youngest child of hers knows WAY more than he'd ever actually come out and tell you. She has a way of sneaking it out of him, though...)