Gardening with a large side of my sad math problems

Yesterday turned out to be a beautiful spring day so I finally decided to get off my duff and give my flower gardens a major overall. After sending out an SOS to my mother of course, my gardening inspiration.

It's our little unspoken deal. I call her when it's time to de-winterize my gardens. She calls me when it's time to bake up a storm for Christmas. We are each other's moral support for tackling daunting tasks.

I also enlisted all three of my children to provide child labor in the form of carting off our full wheelbarrows of weeds and debris to the burn pile, helping me pull down overgrown wisteria from the front porch roof, and dragging off fallen branches and twigs from our giant walnut tree. Blake was especially helpful, using Grandma's hedge trimmers to cut random patches of grass and dig in the gravel. When we finally came inside at dusk I was pleased as punch with our day's work (and more than a little pooped), and the kids were completely worked out.

THEN I discovered that Cooper had brought home the "other half" of the schoolwork he'd missed during our road trip last week (we did what I assumed was all of it before leaving but apparently his teacher saved all the worksheet handouts for his return), and Kendall had several math papers that she needed help understanding - but no math book for me to refer to, and with Russell the math whiz unavailable (because he wasn't home), the evening took an immediate and serious turn for the worse.

Heaven help me if I can't remember a thing I learned in the 4th or 6th grade. The tables were turned and suddenly I was the slave labor and I swear I put my hands to my head and said "I'm not getting this!" at least two or three times as Kendall tried to explain again the definition of the mean, median, mode, and range of a data set. (It would have helped if she actually remembered which one was which.)

And guess what I discovered? (Besides the fact that the entire night was a moment of math humiliation...) You Tube has a handy song about it! Of course it does. And I would just like to state for the record: it's called an average, people! Why make up alternative names like the mean that doesn't make any sense?

I realize that I'm probably making you wonder if I even graduated high school at all, let alone went to college, and the sad truth is yes, both (I was even an honor student), but apparently I haven't retained a single thing when it comes to math. This was confirmed when I switched to helping Cooper and for a few uncertain minutes had to stall while I racked my brain trying to remember what the "lowest common multiple" meant.

(Weirdly enough... while out driving the other day one of my children asked if a particular cloud in the sky was a "cumberbum" cloud and I immediately corrected them to pronounce it cumulus, and then rattled off several other names of clouds and what type they were, which I'm sure is less helpful information to use in real life compared to math, but there it is, I have an apt mind for the useless.)

To sum things up: longest night of my life and today I'm sore all over from weeding for 3 hours straight. I think it's going to be a play day!