Normally I am quite good with numbers.

I can remember car registrations, phone numbers, library card numbers and all sorts of stuff like that.  Conversely I am hopeless at remembering names or faces but that’s beside the point.

The one numerical area where I fall short is birthdays.

For some reason I can never remember the day of the month, and that particularly applies to Herself which is not only a bummer but also potentially life threatening.  Naturally I know she was born in August, but I always get mixed up between the fourth and the sixth.  I know it’s one of the two but can never quite get the hang of which one.

Particularly of the last few years I have been doing a ton of form filling.  Anyone who has ever tried raking back some cash off the state will be familiar with this little pastime.  I can rattle of the year and the month, her mother’s maiden name, where she was born, her tax number and everything else they demand on every form but when it comes to the precise date of her birth the old problem arises.  Four or six?

I was delighted yesterday when the phone rang several times.  Each time it was a relation of some shape or form.  Each time they said they wanted to wish Herself a happy birthday.  Each time I gently mentioned that it was the sixth [I had looked it up on my notebook a few days ago] and not the fourth.  Each time they said they thought it was the fourth, so I am by no means alone.

Now I have come up with a couple of theories about this confusion.

Maybe she was born on the fourth and they decided she was a little undercooked so they shoved her back into the oven for another couple of days?  That would explain the two dates?

Or maybe it was just a long birth?  The head started to show on the fourth and the rest of her finally plopped out on the sixth?

We will never know.