Today Siena turns 2.6!

That number, by the way, is base 12, so the number after the decimal is not 6/10ths but 6/12ths, or one-half. I first heard the base 12 form for age used at day care, when they told me that Siena would officially be allowed to move into preschool at 2.9, and I thought, but she’ll be almost three! Well, they meant 2 and 9 months, or this coming June. It makes great sense to use base 12, because it takes less effort to say “2 point 7” than “2 years, 7 months” or “2.58333 repeating, of course” (that being a quick shout out to jumpow, if he remembers).

Of course, the base 12 form officially breaks down when they say “2.10” because they mean “2 years, 10 months,” and in real base 12, 2.10=2.1 (just like base 10). Likewise, 2.11 doesn’t mean “2 years, 11 months,” but really would be 2 + 1/12 + 1/144, just like 3.14 in base 10 is 3 + 1/10 + 4/100. I doubt we’ll be able to get day care to adopt the hexadecimal approach of using the alphabet to represent the numbers greater than 9, such as A=ten, B=eleven. If they did, then we could say that two months before Siena turns 3, she’ll be 2.A. And similarly on the other end of the age spectrum, I doubt we’d say Siena is A.0 instead of 10.0 (which would be twelve in base 12) when she turns ten. Well, mama at least won’t.

Anyway, it turns out that while they told us legally Siena could not enter the preschool class officially until 2.9, she did start heading over there around 2.3 or 2.4, and they actually moved her cubby sometime in the 2.4 to 2.5 time frame. She was just spending so much time in there with the bigger kids (some of whom she herself is physically bigger than), and she was so ready for it, that they went ahead and moved her stuff. We suspect they also did it because they merged two of the toddler rooms, which was probably possible after they reduced the population by moving Siena.

Can you tell daddy is looking forward to teaching Siena about hexadecimal and binary? Bring it on!