mother's day
unusual "motherly" information

Brain Candy Mothers Day Trivia

Unusual "motherly" information

81% of women 40 to 44 years old are mothers. In 1980, 90 percent of women in that age group were mothers.

67% of women in Kentucky, ages 15 to 44, are mothers. This is among the highest rates in the nation. The national average is 57 percent.

11% of women end their childbearing years with four or more children, compared with 36 percent in 1976.

24.8 is the median age of women when they give birth for the first time - meaning one-half are above this age and one-half are below. The median age has risen nearly three years since 1970.

A woman becomes pregnant most easily at the age of eighteen or nineteen, with little real change until the mid twenties. There is then a slow decline to age thirty-five, a sharper decline to age forty-five and a very rapid decline as the women nears menopause.

The odds of a woman delivering twins is 1-in-33. Her odds of having triplets or other multiple births was approximately 1-in-539.

In humans, most multiple births involve twins - about once in every thirty-three births. By contrast, triplets naturally occur about once in every 7900 births and quadruplets about once in every 705,000 births.

August is the most popular month in which to have a baby, with more than 360,000 births taking place that month in 2001.

Tuesday is the most popular day of the week in which to have a baby, with an average of more than 12,000 births taking place on Tuesdays during 2001.

In the United States, between 1997 and 1999, 539 births were reported among mothers over age 50.

In 2002, the 55% of American women with infant children were in the workforce, compared to 31% in 1976, and down from 59% in 1998. In 2002, there were 5.4 million stay-at-home mothers in the US.

The statistics for 2004 revealed that 35.7 percent of all births were to unmarried women and that the percentage of unmarried mothers increased for all ages and races. The increase translates to almost 1.5 million children being born were to unwed mothers, up significantly – four percent – from 2003.

*****

Mother's Day accounts for more than one-fifth of the floral purchases made for holidays.

Of fresh flowers purchased for Mother's Day: 42% are mixed flowers, 33% roses, 10% carnations, 2% orchids, 1% chrysanthemums/daisies, 1% lilies and 11% other single flower types.  

Of bedding/garden plants purchased for Mother's Day: 15% are geraniums, 15% impatiens, 12% petunias, and 58% other

Of flowering houseplants purchased for Mother's Day: 12% azaleas, 5% African violets, 5% are lilies, 3% chrysanthemums, and 75% other

*****

A baby baleen whale depends on its mother's milk diet for at least six months.

A baby Harp seal doubles its weight in only five days after birth, thanks to the amount of protein in its mother's milk. It takes a horse sixty days to double its birth weight.

A female kangaroo that has become a recent mother holds a reserve embryo inside of her after her first baby has crawled into her pouch. This embryo is an "emergency back-up" baby, should the first one die prematurely.

A female oyster over her lifetime may produce over 100 million young.

A mother giraffe often gives birth while standing, so the newborn's first experience outside the womb is a 1.8-meter (6-foot) drop.

An AT&T survey estimated that 122.5 million phone calls to Mom are made on Mother's Day. Other Mother's Day findings revealed that 11 percent never call their mothers, and 3 percent of the 68 percent planning to ring Mom up called her collect.

If frightened or threatened, a mother rabbit may abandon, ignore, or eat her young.

In 340 B.C., Aristotle observed that dolphins gave birth to live young that were attached to their mothers by umbilical cords. For this reason, he considered dolphins and related creatures to be mammals. Twenty-four centuries later, biologists agreed with him.

In the vast majority of the world's languages, the word for "mother" begins with the letter M.

Just like people, mother chimpanzees often develop lifelong relationships with their offspring.

Kittens are born both blind and deaf, but the vibration of their mother's purring is a physical signal that the kittens can feel - it acts like a homing device, signaling them to nurse.

Missy is the name of Snoopy's mother from the Peanuts cartoon strip.

Mother Mexican free-tailed bats find and nurse their own young, even in huge colonies where many millions of babies cluster at up to 500 bats per square foot.

Mother prairie dogs will nurse their young only while underground in the safety of the burrow. If an infant tries to suckle above ground, the mother will slap it.

The average woman in 17th-century America gave birth to 13 children.

The eggs of the marsupial frog are laid in a brood pouch on the mother's back, and the young hatch out in a zipper-like fashion from the pouch.

The embryos of tiger sharks fight each other while in their mother's womb, the survivor being the baby shark that is born.

There is a strong bond between mother and child among orangutans. Orangutan infants cling almost continually to their mothers until they are 1½ years old.

When baby opossum are born, they are so small that an entire litter can fit in a tablespoon. They live inside their mother's pouch for three months before climbing out and riding on her back.

When the female embryo is only six weeks old, it makes preparations for her motherhood by developing egg cells for future offspring. (When the baby girl is born, each of her ovaries carries about a million egg cells, all that she will ever have).

More unusual "motherly" information