Mommy Math: Back-To-School Edition!

Parents, sharpen those pencils! Even if you flunked every math test you ever took, you’ll ace these real world math problems like you’re channeling Pythagoras.

1. Dana’s tween daughter wants new clothes for school. If Dana spends three weeks shuttling her daughter to five outlet malls within a 50-mile radius of their home, spending $500 on trendy clothing that her daughter gleefully declares “totally on fleek,” estimate to the nearest hour how long it will take her daughter to pull Dana out of a client meeting with an “emergency call” on the first day of school, sobbing that her new clothes are “lame” and demanding that Dana return them all and buy her other clothing.

* Estimate how long Dana will tolerate this bullshit before enrolling her kid in a school where students wear uniforms of khaki pants and navy polos.

2. Anna browses Pinterest boards to find adorable lunches for her first-grader to take to school. If Anna makes five lunches a week and it takes her approximately 30 to 60 minutes to cut up fruit, vegetables and deli meats and then assemble all of the pieces into cutesy animal tableaux for each lunch, calculate how many weeks it will take her to realize her kid is swapping her culinary masterpieces for Uncrustables and Doritos?

3. Danielle’s fourth-grader needs to be at the corner bus stop every morning by 7:30 A.M. to catch the bus to school. If Danielle rolls her son’s bedtime back by 15 minutes a night, beginning two weeks before school starts, calculate how many times Danielle will hear, “But I’m not tired! That’s not fair! It’s still light out! I don’t wanna go to bed!”

* Calculate how many times Danielle’s 9-year-old will miss the bus in the first week of school because he overslept.
* Calculate how many times Danielle’s 9-year-old will get up on time but still miss the bus because he sat around in his underwear staring off into space while Danielle assumed he was eating breakfast.
* How long before Danielle gives up on the kid ever getting to school on time and decides to homeschool?

4. Nicole’s third-grader needs to complete 30-minutes of math homework each night. If her son logs into the school’s online math program on his tablet at 4 P.M. and chooses a worksheet with 20 long division problems, calculate the ratio of division problems solved to Minecraft structures built within that 30 minutes.

5. School starts at 8:30 A.M. If Tara’s kids are dressed in their new back-to-school clothes by 7:45 A.M and Tara spends 15 minutes making her kids breakfast, 15 minutes preparing their lunches and it takes her 15 minutes to drive to school, calculate the odds that one child will knock his cup of chocolate milk directly into his lap, requiring a complete change of clothes 5 minutes before they need to get in the car.

* Calculate the odds that her other child will think what his brother did is so freaking hilarious, he knocks his orange juice into his lap too.
* Estimate how many milligrams of ibuprofen Tara will require to get rid of the headache starting behind her left eye.
* Extra credit: Using graph paper, with the Y axis representing the months in the school year and the X axis representing various types of pain-relievers, plot the point at which Tara starts popping Oxycontin.

6. Working mom Kate enrolls her first-grader in her school’s after-care program. On the first day, Kate arrives for pick-up at 5:05 P.M. On the second day, she arrives at 5:59 P.M. If after-care is open till 6 P.M., and Kate’s first-grader whines that she “missed all the fun” because she was picked up “too early” on day one and then cries “I’m the last one here! You forgot me! ” when Kate arrived “too late” on day two, at what point does Kate realize she cannot possibly win?

7. Sherri waited until the very last weekend before school started to buy pants for her 8-year-old. If she purchased 5 pairs of cargo pants at $20 a pair, buying them on a day when there was a BOGO sale, and then used her store credit card to take an additional 5 percent off, calculate the number of weeks the pants lasted before her kid ripped holes in the knees of every single pair.

* True or False: It doesn’t matter that the pants are ripped because the kid outgrew them before Halloween anyway.