or DVD maths?

Questions posed by Helena when sorting the DVDs: Who has the most DVDs? easy make piles, look at the piles, and the biggest is the most….. next question due to there being both DVDs and Videos Is that true? piles were counted. Helena has 15 and I have “you  have two more than me..”  17 and then there are some we share. My question – So how many DVDs do you have per year of your life?  6 + 6 = 12, followed by my apparently rolling on the floor amusing observation “I may have two more but you have over two per year of your life and I don’t even have half a one per year.” Then a BIG question – How long would it take to watch them all? well.. out came the abacus.  Several conversations later on would that take an hour to watch? and how many minutes in an hour? what is 72 – 60?, sometimes phrased as what is the difference between 72 and 60? The longest was the Fantasia Video at 115 mins. Interestingly the video of Bugs Life is 7 minutes longer than the DVD. So the grand total was 1128 minutes and Helena can competently use an abacus. “that would take days to watch” hmmmm would it? How could we work that out? I notice that 1128 is close to 1200. So Helena what is 6 + 6, an immediate recall of 12 (too much Monopoly), what is 60 + 60 er na….. Out comes the peg board, “so Helena what happens when we have lots of 10? what is 2 lots of 10 Helena?”  we work on the peg board for a while making groups of ten until wham bam “Ah, we just add the 0, 5 lots of 10 is 50” so if 2 lots of 6 is 12 what do you think 2 lots of 60 is, 6 tens plus 6 tens?  BINGO 12 lots of 10.. Show me on the abacus.. 120 is two quality hours of TV … and 2 lots of 600, 6 100s plus 6 100s? (600 minutes being 10 hours of TV as worked out by adding a 0, “woo, I’ve walked for 10 hours” someone was impressed) and it is indeed 12 lots of 100. So we then know what 20 hours is! Using an abacus for subtraction, what is the difference between 1128 and 1200? – one DVD more and she’ll have 20 hours worth “wow”.. eventually we get to the 18 hours and 48 minutes of viewing pleasure????

I can’t work out how to put in Helena’s body movements in the above as the actual words took very little time but were interspersed with seemingly hours of wriggles, jiggles and fidgets. I also had to do a little checking – “are we finished Helena? we can come back to this” apparently not. She really really wanted to know…

and we weren’t finished, “so if I watched 1 minute a day for a year would I watch a whole video?” followed by the slightly left field “so how old was Beanpa (grandfather) when you were born? when I was born? then how old was he when Rowan (cousin-first grandchild) was born?”  Making maths relevant!