read-a-thon, the many names of Bubs, more of Nathan's math

Read-a-thon
Today we decided to do a "read-a-thon". We got unhealthy snacks and the boys decided to do it on Sat. (today) so we could do it with Daddy. It went as well as you might think with a 5, 7 and 1 year old who was grumpy. The kids thought it was a junk-food-a-thon. We did do some reading though. We'll finish tonight because every night before they go to bed they just can't get enough of reading- they want me to read just another book before they have to go to sleep! We all stayed in our jammies, because that's part of a read-a-thon, too.

The many names of Bubs
We realized that Katie is not going to ever know what her real name is. When someone asks us what her name is, I say Katherine and Todd says Katie. At home, we call her Baby, Baby girl, cute baby, bubba, bubs, bubbers, bubber, babe, babes, bubba girl, katie cutie, katie bug, katie bub, bubster, bubberooni. I guess it's only fitting for the family, though, Alex thinks his name is Richard Alex Zander Carlson, and Nathan thinks his name is John Nathan Carlson. It's only one of the many things our children will go to counseling for because of us!

More of Nathan's Math
Allison said I should write down the specific math problems Nathan does. He does many all day. Yesterday Nathan said, "7 take away 9 is negative 2." Then Alex asked, "What's 100 take away 1,000?" He said "Negative 900." I asked him where he learned negatives (who teaches a 5 year old negatives?) and he said he heard me say it a couple times. I remembered when he was first adding and subtracting he would occasionally say the bigger number minus the smaller number and I would say it was negative whatever. I guess he caught on to the pattern.
Yesterday he also told me 8 squared is 64. Great Grandpa Carlson taught him squares and square roots. He literally thinks about numbers all day long. On the way home from our drive to Arkansas, he was counting for 3-4 hours straight. He continued counting from where he left off, a little more each day when he is trying to go to sleep or bored or in the car, etc. Right now he's at 22,000 and says he wants to get to 30,000. He's a little OCD about numbers. His favorite kind of math is figuring out seconds, minutes and hours; big huge numbers; and money math, but any kind of math he loves. If we give him a hard problem and he thinks about it for a while and we try and help him by giving him a hint, he yells, "Let me do it! Let me do it!" He never wants any help. And on his math workbook, he can't have any markings except the answer, and if he has to do some marking, he erases it. We learned carrying in math and he won't write the carried number on top of the next column. He says he wants everyone to think he does it all in his head. He won't do any counting on his fingers, either. Today he said sometime we should do a math-a-thon where we do math all day.