Not Smarter Than a 5th Grader

Well, it's 10:47 PM and Scott and I have been exploring decimal multiplication, which is not as fun as it sounds. Golda has been having a little trouble in math lately, and I am no help. When I see a math worksheet, my eyes glaze over, just like they did when I was in 5th grade. Tell me if you had this quandry today: "A can of dog food weighs 0.6 lb. Arthur's dog gets 0.5 can of food for dinner. How much does the dog's dinner weigh?" If you know the answer already, shut up. If you just give the whole can of food to the dog and hope he doesn't get sick, then you are my kind of person. I want to tell Golda that when she is a grown-up, she will have a calculator built into her cell phone, she will not weigh dog food, and she will not go around measuring things with bar graphs. But I can't. I have to stay up late figuring out how to help her feel better about math so she doesn't struggle like I did. Besides, I've got to know this stuff for when Ruby hits 5th grade. My 5th grader can do a lot of things I can't do: She won a gold ribbon in ballroom dancing last Saturday. She got to the second-to-last round of the geography bee today. She wears matching socks almost every day. Even my 3rd grader can do things I can't. Cursive. Fractions. Remembering things. Last week, I set a platter of cookies on top of the fridge. I said to Ruby, "When I leave for my party tonight, you have to say, 'Mom, you forgot the cookies that are on the fridge,' OK?" And that is EXACTLY what happened, just as I was walking out the door empty-handed. Good thing I had the foresight to involve Ruby, huh? What I'm not sure about is whether I was always an imbecile, or if it happened after I had kids!