As you follow your own kids growing up, you often reminisce back to your own youth...you know, when I was Raili's age, I was interested in this and I was doing that.... I now also realize that I was quite carefree compared to the five year olds of today. I didn't have any homework, spelling tests or math quizzes. I think I was probably still trying NOT to eat sand in the sandbox. And I certainly I didn't need to know how to put sentences together.

It's not easy being a five year old in 2009.

The amount of homework that Raili has is simply amazing and the school demands a lot from both kids and parents. As an example; each week Raili gets five new words that she needs to learn how to spell and how to write. Last week those five words were: sock, clock, duck, neck and stick. Every Friday there is a spelling test for those words plus five random ones from weeks before. She has come a long way from last Fall when we were trying to catch up to all the other kids and simply learn how to write. Now we still spend a minimum of one hour each night practicing letters and the new words so that she gets at least those five right in the next test.

She also has Chinese homework that is usually a combination of math, reading and writing.

This one required her to cut out individual words or sayings from a printout and make eight sentences out of them. Thank goodness for David because the only words that I recognized were the signs for water and "shang" (=above) from the word Shanghai. 

Last week she did get a perfect score for creative thinking though when she was working through her math sheet. The template asked her to add up the equation inside a little house and then color the house in red if the total was an even number. I asked her to start looking through the equations (First house: 17-9=?, Second house: 7+5+?, etc.) while I put the plates away. As I got back five minutes later, she had already calculated all the equations AND colored the exactly right houses with even numbers!

I was dumbfounded.  "Raili, that's amazing" is all I could come up with. I couldn't figure out how she had got it done so fast and correct on her own. "What....How....Who....?" I stuttered. "Easy beesy, mom". "Look!"

She pulls out David's financial calculator from behind her back. "I just used this!". And so she had. Weeks ago we had shown her how to use it when I was calculating something for work and she had asked what I was doing. Obviously it had all gone in because she then proudly proceeded to show me how "easy" math actually was with this little machine. "See...six take away four equals....TWO! Easy beesy, mom".

Sure was. Now I'm wondering how soon we should introduce her to the compounding interest rate function so that she can start figuring out when we should refinance our mortgage.