> Some numbers represent real things. Like my little kid saw a pair of oven mitts and said 'two gloves'. Like, he was seeing a literal manifestation of two-ness in front of him - which is different than the logical idea of 1+1 or the symbol 2.

Yes but even then you are using an abstraction. The two gloves forming a pair are a good exemple because they are not even actually identical: there is a left one and a right one. Yet, we can abstractly see them as a kind of glove.