kinda like the Hunger Games

Now that Meatball is out of school for the summer we have to start "homeschooling" because no matter how awesome he is, Meatball cannot have downtime or a flexible schedule.  The house would be ever more like Bedlam within a week than it already is.  Seriously, I am not exaggerating our absolute need for constant mental stimulation and scheduled control.

So you may see more posts about kid related activities here soon (I say may because lord knows there are a lot of things keeping me from posting lately!) but this was an unintentional learning moment.

See those eight hundred little pieces of paper?  It is a game that one of our local grocery stores runs from like February to May every year.  Monopoly.  Have I ever told you how much I hate REAL Monopoly?  Seriously, has anyone in the history of time every finished a game without cheating just to end the agony of boredom?  Well this isn't as bad as the board game, but it can be frustrating. They give you a game board with a bunch of prizes and you have to collect the ticket like game pieces and fill in the missing sections in order to win prizes that vary from $5 cash up to a million dollars.

Meatball was convinced we'd win something.  Something really awesome, like the X-Box with Kinect that he wants sooo very badly.  Or the million bucks, he figured we'd buy him an X-Box if we one that.

So whenever we went to this store (which is not the store I usually shop at) we would collect the pieces and eventually slap them on the board.  We had enough pieces so that every prize was one to three pieces away from winning.  On the last day of the game pieces being handed out Paul Bunyan ran in to grab something and instead of the couple he should have gotten the lady just handed him the rest of the stack.

That pile is the mess *I* was left with.  Well that and a totally neurotic 11 year old who was convinced we were just a couple slips of paper away from millionaires.

We slowly sorted them, which took over a bloody hour I might add, and I explained some lovely mathematical concepts to Meatball.

• Proportion: The amount of tickets produced in relation to the other tickets.  For example, if it takes 8 game pieces to win a million dollars they will produce a royal butt ton of about five of those tickets, a hundred of about 2 of them and maybe one of the last one.  
• Odds: The odds of winning a game like this are completely not stacked in your favor no matter how high the chances are according to the people selling you the dang game pieces.

After sorting them all and realizing that while we were "close" we had not even won "five stinkin' bucks" Meatball declared that the odds were NOT in our favor at all.

"Its like the Hunger Games, 

they say the odds are in your favor 

but all you are is 

hungry, broke and going to die."

My child, the optimist.