In our lives… I had a great Mother’s Day – sleeping in until 9:30 am, receiving lots of homemade cards and drawings from my daughter and a very nice special breakfast prepared by daughter and her Papa. It’s good to know that she still thinks I am an awesome Mom, best in the world and her hero. I am not feeling particularly heroic at the moment, but rather burnt out with work, and I am really looking forward to our vacation next week!
Afterschool. Nothing too scheduled was happening at home. Anna’s Dad keeps giving her progressively more challenging problems, but she is able to solve them independently when she applies herself. I, however, happen to think that calculations are nice, but the real trick in math is ability to apply them, see patterns and reason through difficult problems where solution is not obvious at the first glance. Luckily, Internet gave me a chance to revisit my youth and find a set of selected problems from Russian math and physics magazine Kvant (obviously, it’s in Russian, but if you are interested, send me an email, and I’ll translate some for you). Most of them are way over Anna’s head, but I am giving some of the simpler ones to her anyway to stretch her mind and to show her what real “brainy math” looks like.
Places we are going. Most of the week was cold, but a heat wave returned for the weekend. We are looking forward to our community swimming pool opening for the season next weekend. In the meantime, Anna spent a lot of time playing in the sprinkles, helping us weed our veggie patch and learning from our neighbor how to climb trees.
Happiness picture of the week:









