How Sully Managed To Get An Early Christmas Present

We've had suspicions that Sully was going to be a math whiz for some time.  Now that he's in kindergarten- this part of his brain has just exploded and now he spends considerable amounts of time counting, making patterns, pointing out symmetry and figuring out simple equations in his head.

It started with your basic addition and subtraction and we'd quiz him on what seemed to be age appropriate questions- but it became obvious in about 2 seconds that he had those down, so we kept going and low and behold he kept figuring out the answers-easily.

Soon he was asking questions that indicated he was interested in multiplication,  so we explained that concept to him and he took right to it.  He even get the concept of multiplying by 0.  I know that's not a complex concept,  but he's 5, and we only had to explain it to him once- he got it just like that.

So anyway- the kid likes math.  Which brings me to the abacus.  Sully has had this abacus since he was like one.  Its a piece of crap, made in a sweatshop type of thing.  Its been broken for a long time, down from 10 rows of 10 to 8 wobbly rows,  but he still uses it- a lot.

So we bought him a new one for Christmas- a nice high quality one from Plan Toys.  It arrived Thursday and I wrapped it and stuck it under the tree.

The next day- while playing with the abacus-another row bit the dust.  Mike told Sully the abacus had to go and put it in the trash.  Que the epic meltdown.

Sully doesn't do well when any toy breaks and has to go-  we deal with this a lot.  But this one was a bit more severe than usual.  We tried to calm him down and told him that maybe a new abacus would arrive for Christmas.  This gave him pause.  But then the tears and the wailing came back.  Choking and blubbering the way kids do, he managed to blurt out the most compelling argument to give him an early Christmas present ever known to man....

"But I won't be able to count and add really big numbers until Christmas!!!"  

Mike and I instantly melted- are you freaking kidding me with this kid?  Unbelievable!  So-Sully got to open a present early.  The look on his face when he saw the new abacus was priceless,  and hysterically- he instantly identified the features that made the new abacus superior to the old one and the math fun continued.  This morning he determined how many letters were in the alphabet and discovered that 25 x 4 is equal to 10 x 10 -  tomorrow he'll probably master the quadratic formula!

The other morning, I showed him how to use a calculator- then he disappeared to play with it!