Responsibility and Math

Most days I get up around 6:00 a.m. while Jeremy is getting ready for work but on Friday my alarm didn't go off, and I fell back asleep after Jeremy kissed me good-bye. I usually wake Aidan up around 7:15 to get ready for school. At 7:30 I woke up with a jolt and rushed out of our room to go wake Aidan up only to find he was already out of bed. In fact he'd taken matters into is own hands and made himself breakfast. He'd used the bathroom step stool to reach the top shelf of the pantry for the cereal and was calmly eating when I came downstairs. I asked how long he'd been awake and he said since 7:12. He didn't want to disturb me. I helped him finish getting ready for school and then told him I needed a shower before the other kids woke up and asked if he could manage getting out the door for the bus at 8:03 by himself. He was OK with doing that and yelled bye to me through the bathroom door at the appointed time. It makes me wonder if he would have woken me up at all had I continued to sleep or if he would have just seen to everything himself and gone on his way...


While I'm on the subject of Aidan I want to say that we have a math maniac on our hands-he's always had a thing for numbers-when he was four, I'd put him down for a nap and he would lay there and count as high as he could (into the thousands) instead of sleeping if he wasn't tired. He's been assessed extensively at school with regards to math. He's currently in first grade, and it was decided that he would accelerate to third grade math this year. He is doing wonderfully well with the third graders and it seems to be providing the challenge he needs in this area. They have been working on "Number Sense"recently which includes writing numbers in various forms and one day when he came home from school and wrote 1,111 on a paper and then proceeded to come up with all the ways that number can be written-expanded form: 1000 + 100 + 10 + 1, written form: one thousand one hundred eleven; etc. He did all five of the ways they'd worked on in school and wanted to come up with one more and remembered Roman Numerals as a way to write numbers, so we headed to the Internet to look them up which made him quite happy. That is a serious love of numbers!