Transcript
A tweet by Ivanka Trump @ivankatrump saying “I cannot believe that Theodore is eight months old today! Happy birthday little teddy bear!” with an admittedly cute picture of a child smiling. It has a reply from @blacknmild saying “this isn’t how birthdays work”
That’s stupid and makes no sense.
I celebrate every occasion that the child’s age doubles, starting from the first second.
Curiosity triggered. Ignoring leap years because it only changes the days a little at the end:
Day doublings (8):
⬆️ 27 celebrations in first year of life | up to 7 celebrations past first year ⬇️
Those actually line up surprisingly well with real life milestones. I think an argument could be made to celebrate half-doublings after 8y…, but that would lose some of the elegance of this system. Although I guess you just have to calculate the first one (roughly 12y 280d 7h) and then just double those as well (so the others would be 25y 195d 14h, 51y 26d 4h, 102y 52d 8h).
See? Much more sensible. You get loads of front-loaded precious moments, and then some very relevant milestones later on in life, only requiring about one third of the overall celebrations!
Honestly? Yeah. I feel slightly bad for some of the earlier childhood years (under 13 or so) that don’t get one. Otherwise, 100% agreement.
My wife, who tends to try to milk her entire “birthday month”, would disagree. A “birthday month” is whichever is most convenient from: the month leading up to, calendar month of, or month leading after her actual birthday.
Found the programmer.
To be fair, I wasn’t trying to hide.
I celebrate every prime number.
I’ll allow it.