What happens when the year turns to 3?

We were on holiday in London (more on that later) and sat in The Natural History Museum having dinner. Things had been fairly tense all morning and sat in a restaurant is always tense due to the noise and food and smells. So when my son asked…

“What happens when the year turns to 3?”

I felt good. This was a good question to get his mind distracted from everything else. It took me a while to work out what he meant though. And after a few follow up questions from me I realised he meant what happens when we go from the year 2999 to the year 3000. It was also interesting because today was the 1st August and when my son realised, he was over the moon….because it’s his sister’s birthday month. This was a completely different reaction to when the calendar turned to July. And I wondered if my son had been thinking about the calendar since this morning and this led him to wonder about the year 3000. I explained that actually me and my husband had lived through something like that except it had been 2000 and absolutely nothing happened at all. Remember, everyone thought the world was going to end but it didn’t. In fact everything stayed exactly the same apart from the beginning of the year. It moved from a 1 to a 2 and that was that. But that wasn’t what he wanted to know. He actually just wanted to know what the year would be called? And so I said…

“Year 3000”

And I realised this wasn’t about the calendar changing it was about the number 3. Because recently my son seemed to be obsessed by the number 3. The previous day we had been souvenir shopping and he was looking at keyrings, they were £3.99 each or 3 for £10 and as he was looking he said to me ooooo I really want more than one. I asked him how many he wanted and he said…

“I want 3 because 3 is a calm number”

I didn’t really think too much about it at the time, I was just pleased that he hadn’t wanted 4!! But after he asked about the year 3000 I started to research the number 3. Could number 3 be classed as a calm number. And my research took me to Pythagoras again, who I have mentioned before in relation to my son in the post Maths and The Many Many Questions of My Child!. Pythagoras believed 3 was a sacred number.  In his eyes the number 3 was considered THE perfect number, the number of harmony, wisdom and understanding. It was also the number of time – past, present, future; birth, life, death; beginning, middle, end – it was the number of the divine. And once again my son had blown my mind. He said 3 was a calm number, Pythagoras believed it to a number of harmony, wisdom and understanding – all traits associated with calmness. Not only that but my son loved time, it was his special interest without a doubt, and Pythagoras believed 3 was the number of time!! My mind was well and truly blown.

I sometimes thought that my son had been here before, I know that sounds ridiculous but the things he said were way beyond his years of 6 years old and led me to believe that he knew stuff he couldn’t possibly know unless he had been here before. How did he know the number 3 was a calm number? Was he Pythagoras in disguise? He certainly loved numbers. I guess time will tell.

And for the rest of the holiday I couldn’t stop thinking about the number 3. And annoyingly I couldn’t stop singing the song Year 3000 by Busted……