yendi

So, yesterday, walking home from karate, we stopped to get Elayna some Tofutti, and she seemed confused that the auto-checkout machine gave me some money back. I honestly wonder if she'd ever seen change before, or if she's just so used to credit and debit cards, that she never though much about cash. It's certianly not that I've never used cash in front of her, but she may not have been paying attention at Brusters or Burger King.

Anyway, she asked me how much change I'd received. I decided to have some fun with her, and I said, "well, I gave the machine $5, and the Tofutti cost $2.59. So what's 500-259?"

Elayna has only been doing subtraction with borrowing for a couple of months now. And, as it turns out, she's never had to double-borrow (i.e., borrow from the hundreds column so that she could then borrow from the tens column). So she had a new concept, too. And she's never, ever, borrowed without having paper. She did have to ask repeatedly which item was in the tens column on the bottom (to her, the subtrahend is always on the bottom, never the right), and similar things. And at one time, from what she was muttering, I could tell that she'd mis-counted the tens column, but she caught that (more impressive without paper), and eventually piped up with the correct answer -- 241. It's not like she popped it out in five seconds like some movie-cliche genius, but figuring it out in her head was damned impressive. I really thought she'd only get so far, and then decide it was too hard. I'm damned proud of her.