I intentionally married an engineer in the hopes of creating tiny humans with perfectly balanced brains, with my portion contributing to their English excellence and my husband providing all that boring math stuff. Nowhere in my job description as a Stay-at-Home Super Mom did I sign up for endless amounts of complex math problems; and yet somehow motherhood is riddled with word problems that look like this:

If your child falls asleep in the car for longer than 3 minutes, they will

a. take their regularly scheduled nap for its full allotted time

b. take a shorter nap at another time

c. count those 3 minutes as that day’s nap time and then proceed to be cranky for the total number of hours they should actually be napping.

The answer is c. Always c.

Here is a list of daily mommy equations (look at me using math terms!) that include but are not limited to: probability, fractions, and ratios; and just like mathematical proofs, these statements can always be proved true:

Equation #1: Other people will appoint themselves experts on your family equation—claiming to know the appropriate gender ratio and proper size. 2 girls? Oh, your husband must need a boy.

Clearly, my husband has everything he needs 😊

Equation #2: The healthier the food the longer you can stretch the 10-second rule. For example, if broccoli gets dropped on the ground, the 10-second rule stands. However, the opposite is true for unhealthy foods. When your child drops a cupcake on the playground—uh-oh, it’s garbage within 2 seconds. The inverse of this rule applies for adults: broccoli= garbage, cupcake=easily edible after 10-seconds and just pray for frosting side up.

Equation #3: No child shall start a nap after 3pm, or else their bedtime and your bedtime will overlap. You can roll the dice and skip nap time altogether in hopes of an early bedtime, but you may experience extreme whininess for the last two hours of the evening.

Equation #4: A messy activity is acceptable as long as the clean-up time required takes only 1/10th the amount of time your toddler gave you of blissful, uninterrupted, quiet time.

For example; pictured below is a friend’s daughter expressing her creativity by sticking women’s sanitary products around the house, including her baby sister (bonus time is given if both children are involved!). This looks like 30 minutes of harmless fun, for less than 3 minutes of clean up.