Full disclosure here. I had to look online whether the Roman numeral for nine was VIIII or IX. I also had a math tutor in high school. Thankfully, most of Mama math is subjective.
Ready? Here we go…
The Runaway Mama decides to bake cupcakes during Tropical Storm Isaac. This is partly because she’s bored and partly because she thinks if she does something that requires electricity, her power will not go out. (This is known as reverse psychology or the desperate measures of a panic stricken woman with PTSD from previous hurricane power outages that lasted for weeks. Yes, weeks. Plural as in more than one.) She stumbles across a recipe online that calls for two sticks of butter for the vanilla cupcakes and two sticks of butter for the vanilla cream icing. She thinks to herself, That’s a lot of butter, but she bakes them anyway. In the end, she only uses half of the icing (so one stick of butter) to ice the cupcakes. If each stick of butter has eight tablespoons and she makes 24 cupcakes with icing, how many tablespoons of butter are in each cupcake?
This is a real word problem, folks, and solving it required more time and effort than I’d like to admit. According to my calculations, between the cupcake and the icing, there’s approximately one tablespoon of butter in each one. That’s not so bad, and let me tell you, each bite was worth it. And I ran two miles the next day, so it’s kind of like it never happened.
In the course of one morning, the Runaway Mama takes one little monkey to Kindergarten and one squishy monkey to preschool. Then she takes one dog on a walk, finds one hissing little snake INSIDE the doorframe of her front door (translation: one slither away from being an uninvited house guest), hops over one Charlotte’s web caliber spider web, and encounters a swarm of about 12 terrifying little black birds on her run. How many wild animals (human, leashed, or otherwise) did the Runaway Mama encounter before lunch, and when will she be brave enough to open her front door without a severe onset of ophiophobia symptoms, including but not limited to shortness of breath, crying, cursing, and/or putting the house up for sale?
Seventeen and never. Not only is my garage already a danger zone (I found two snakes there a few months ago), but also now the front door is no longer a viable method of entering and exiting the house. If I were Santa Clause, I’d use the chimney, but that’s silly for a lot of reasons, including the fact that I don’t have a chimney. And thank God, because who knows what creatures would get in that way. I’d like to formally volunteer to live in a bubble.
In three days, the Runaway Mama will celebrate her 10th wedding anniversary.
There’s no math here, just awe.
The Runaway Mama by Jen Gregory 