Okay, so he didn't invent calculus or anything like that, but Evan has been impressing us with his (what we think is) advanced mental math skills lately. No lie - the kid knows how to multiply multi-digit numbers in his head. Yesterday he overhead Steve talking about someone selling video games for what seemed like a ridiculously low price. Steve said, "Even if you bought them for only $10 each at 30 games that would still be a lot." A minute or so later Evan informed us that 30 games at $10 each would be $300. I asked him how he knew that and he explained that he already knew what 10 ten's was (100), so then he just had to do it three times. So, he broke down the word problem into its compenents and into pieces that he knew how to handle.Today we were talking about $30 steaks and he told us that 4 $30 steaks would be $120. I think the first equation was more impressive, but here he did it with different numbers. I could tell he was doing some counting of some sort, but didn't know what he was "ciphering" until he blurted it out. (Even then he can be pretty vague and I have to ask questions to figure out what he is talking about. For some reason I don't know what he means when he says, "That would be 120 for four" a minute or so after the adult conversation has moved on.) So communication skills may need some work, but we are pretty impressed with his apparent innate way with numbers.
By the way, Steve and I do not take credit for this ability. Neither of us claims to be good at mental math, but my brothers are. Steve's brother may be, too, but I am not sure. I guess it's somewhere in the gene pool because this is certainly not something we have taught him.
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