Explore 2019: Math by Hand

Anyone else have to work really hard to not say "OMG I HATE MATH!" in front of their kids? I feel especially tuned to this as a mom of girls.

And the annoying thing is, I don't even really hate math! I more hate the fact that I used to love math and then had a crappy teacher who made me grow to hate math. Which meant that I opted out of math ASAP and instead took computer programming for my math requirement in college.

As it turns out, Laurel and Violet love math, and Jon is naturally great at it. I don't have enough interest to actually pursue math study, but today I decided to do a small thing and explore (my #2019 word) doing some calculations by hand, instead of using a calculator or Excel. It actually felt good to stretch the brain adding up numbers, and also, btw, the research I used to do on aging brains suggests that you will totally live your best elderly cognitive life if you keep your brain active with little things like this!

And why the colorful pens? Because I realized after doing my calculations that colorful pens make everything better so I'm going to keep these at the ready for my next round of hand calculations!