Mom was at a baby shower yesterday for Godfather Blaine and his wife Sarah. She foolishly told me to show up with the Boys at the scheduled end of the festivities. Hahaha. We managed to keep them from actually breaking anything, although Charles almost took out a chandelier with some balloons a couple of times (by getting the balloons stuck in the lights and then pulling on the strings as hard as he could).
Eventually Mom had enough worrying about our liability situation and the boys and I were sent on our way. On the way home, Corwin announced that he had discovered the largest number he knew: 9,001,079. I asked him if he knew the number 9,001,080. He thought about that a bit and decided that Dad was trying to one up him. He said that he now knew the number 9,001,179. I responded with 9,002,081. I wish I could remember all of the numbers we used, but I found Corwin’s earnest efforts to come up with bigger numbers very amusing. However, Corwin worked out the bigger picture by the time we got home. Rather than just one up him every time (which I did for a while), I started jumping by thousands, then ten thousands and finally hundreds of thousands.I let Corwin top me at 9,608,581 and subsided. But as we were getting out of the car, Corwin had an idea for a new number - 10,000,000. I told him “wow, that’s big!”. Then he flung 11,000,000 and immediately afterwards 12,000,000 at me. I told him that was crazy talk, those numbers were way too big. As you might expect, this set him off to the tens of millions and the hundreds of millions before we got to the door from the garage to the house. He had to stop at a thousand million (although, if we were British, he would not have). I explained billions to him and he immediately went with “a million billion”, which I pointed out was a quadrillion. Satisfied with his dominance of the number system, he decided to declare victory and watch TV.