The boys and I have been doing a lot of math games lately. Most recently, we’ve been having fun trying to trick \u00a0each other into getting easy math wrong. The other day I was riding with my youngest, and I asked him what 6+6 was.<\/p>\n
“Um,” he said.<\/p>\n
I made the air horn sound. “Too slow!”<\/p>\n
“Twelve,” he shouted.<\/p>\n
“10+2?”<\/p>\n
“Twelve”<\/p>\n
“24 divided by 2?”<\/p>\n
“Twelve”<\/p>\n
I could see in the mirror that he knew what was coming. One of the tricks we do is ask someone a bunch of rapid fire questions, all of which have the same answer. Once it gets rolling, you slip in a question with a different answer.<\/p>\n
“8+4?”<\/p>\n
“12!”<\/p>\n
“4+8?”<\/p>\n
“12!”<\/p>\n
“4 times 3?”<\/p>\n
“12!”<\/p>\n
“4 + 3?”<\/p>\n
“Six!”<\/p>\n
I chuckled. “Six?”<\/p>\n
He took a moment to roll the question back in his head. “Wait! Seven! I meant seven!”<\/p>\n
“Gotcha.”<\/p>\n
“Oh man! You always go to six after asking me twelves.”<\/p>\n
“Not this time,” I said again, trying to keep my voice light while my brain processed what he’d just said. Not only had he noticed a pattern in my questions that I wasn’t aware of, but he’d been using it to answer my questions so he didn’t have to do the math.<\/p>\n
“4 times 2,” he said.<\/p>\n
“Eight,” I answered, and the game continued.<\/p>\n
I have to admit, though, that I’m feeling out-gunned. All I’ve been doing is math. I haven’t been analyzing trends in my opponent’s questions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Ever have one of those moments when you realize that you’re not going to be ahead of the kids that much longer? Yeah, this was one of those.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[122,119],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1853","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daddytales-n","category-daddytales-funny"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6DpYi-tT","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1853","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1853"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1853\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1853"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1853"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1853"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}