Mail thought this story blog worthy. Before he hears my version he will write his version and then we will compare notes.

The sun sort of poked out its face today and we lost no time in tossing the books, video games and other learned things aside to go for a walk. We had a really lovely walk full of fun people and important errands and a great lunch, and on the way back Mail decided to outsmart us with one of his endless math quibblers. A normal math quibbler of his is this one; “What is 1 plus 1?” If you say 2, he’ll say wrong because if you put one and one together you get 11. If you say 11, he’ll roll his eyes sadly skyward to indicate his pity that you’ve been deprived of the basics, announcing the real answer is 2. If you point out that his answer changes at will just so that he can prove you wrong, he accuses you of being paranoid and a poor sport.

Today’s quibbler:

“What is 100 million plus 100 thousand plus 1oo?” he asked.

“100 million 1oo thousand and 100 hundred.” I said decidedly. He is still trying to work out how I do this so fast because he is just getting the hang of place value. This time, as usual, he barely waited for me to finish before declaring me wrong. This isn’t the first time in parenting history that I’ve noticed 7-year-olds really need you to be wrong about a lot of stuff so they can set you straight.

“Why?” I asked suspiciously.

“Because, at the end of the question I muttered 200 really quietly,” and he smiled as if to say “In your face!”

“Well,” I winked at Anoif to get her to pay special attention to the mom parry from which no child can ever recoup. She would need it someday if she were to raise little punks who thought they could outwit you of her own.

“When you were muttering that 200, I muttered 200 back at ya’ so fast I practically erased yours. So I did say the real answer.”

“Hmm. Well, I deflected your muttering with my powerful mind block. So you were still wrong.”

“Not actually, see, because I sent my belch of oblivion to obliterate your mind block, and the 200 crept in there after all.”

“That’s what you think. Because I had a super force field time machine that bungeed it back at you through space and time so hard that this argument never even started.”

“No, no, no. I had a subsonic whistle that shattered your time travel force field in to so many bits of glass shard and then bopped you on top of the head with it, bam,200!”

“That might be so, but your subsonic whistle was instantly regurglated by my supersonic power stomp, which-”

“Regurglated?! Okay…you win. If you get to the point where you can regurgle me, you definitely win.”

“Thanks Mom.”

“My pleasure.”

“We should blog this.”

“Okay. I’ll blog it.”

“No,I’ll blog it. You can type it for me though.”

“Why don’t we both blog it? Then we can see how they differ.”

“Okay, but can you make me a new blog because my blog is called Games & More and it is only about games.”

Anoif stopped laughing for the first time to remind Mail that the “& More” part could be stuff such as this. He reluctantly agreed. Then I said I thought what we had just done was a kind of game and he seemed satisfied at last that no new blog would be required.