Addition, Jonah Style (and a curiosity)

Just a short post (why not? After all, it's only been two and a half months!).

Jonah has been doing basic math for quite a while now. I'm not talking about counting, he's been able to count to well over one-hundred, and more or less properly understand the concept of a thousand, since he was about four and a half years old. I'm talking about addition. One day he randomly started throwing out some addition questions. "Is 2+2 4?" "Is 2+4 6?" "Is 3+5 8?" He doesn't always get them right, but he's usually within a difference of one. He didn't pick this up on Sesame Street, so we weren't sure how he figured it out exactly, or what his method was. This was over a year ago, if I remember correctly. We've tried different times to help encourage him into larger problems (he's fairly comfortable adding together single digits), or other things like subtraction and basic multiplication, and he'll pay attention for a little while when we try to explain something, but he loses interest fairly quickly. I assumed (and still do) this is because he's using his own little private Jonah method, and our textbook methods don't quite mesh.

Well, for some reason today he finally decided to share his method with Sunny! She then had him tell me again how he does it after I got home. He said it was "a new way to count." Then he explained to me that 4+4 is 1 2 3 4 5 1 6 2 7 3 8 4, so 4+4 is 8. Using this method, I can see why moving beyond adding your basic single digits could get cumbersome! I'm impressed that he seems to have come up with this on his own; he obviously had a system he was using, because he was right most of the time, and I don't know anywhere he could have learned this system from someone else. I'm also a bit worried though that when it comes time for him to study math he's going to get frustrated by learning to do it a different way. Though, I suppose all he'll really be doing is adding new steps to his system. Once you learn about numeric places, his single digit system will still apply. And of course the more he does it, he'll just start to memorize basic facts. So, maybe I'm concerned over nothing.

The second thing I wanted to mention is something I'm not sure yet if I'm concerned about or not. For a couple weeks now I've randomly noticed a feeling like something is crawling on my leg or foot. The first few times I did the typical frantic swatting and flailing as if it were a bug, only to discover nothing was there. Now it's happening so frequently that it's fairly annoying, but I generally dismiss it as the "phantom bug", rubbing at it to make it go away, not out of a concern that something is actually crawling on me. It's not an itch, or a pain, or that feeling you get when you cut off the circulation, but it happens fairly often (probably ten times now since I've been writing this post) and almost always in my right leg. It doesn't seem to matter if I'm sitting or standing. I'm trying to decide if this is something I should eat the copay to go talk to my doctor about, or just live with it. Feel free to share your thoughts on the matter, or send links to terrifying medical journal articles about things that sound similar. Even if it's not helpful, it might be amusing.