DD5 counts everything - the rings on a spiral notebook, the actors in a play during the curtain call, etc. One day, we dashed into Target in a super big hurry, and she wanted to know how many lights were in the ceiling. If I had had time, I might have answered her question with multiplication (the store really isn't a rectangle - it could have been a project). Not surprisingly, she loves math and is very analytical.
This week I realized that she thinks everyone else does this. At school, I went into another room to talk to her teacher. She was curious about the meeting and wanted to know which room I was in. I didn't know, so I tried to describe it as a room with tables and chairs. Then she started quizzing me on the tables. She really wanted to know how many had been in there, and she seemed perplexed that I hadn't counted them (which had never occurred to me). I said that I had only looked around for a minute, and then she wanted to know if it was a minute with 60 seconds or the kind of minute that means just a little bit. I'm a mathy person, but I was never like this. What makes a child want to count everything?
