JPL, zero

Walking up to JPL yesterday to take the bus home, Maggie points to the sign at the entrance and declares, "That say's JPL!" Not so surprising, as she recognizes the Roman alphabet with no trouble, but it does count as the second word (after "zoo") that she can read.

Aside: for a long time, she's been better with the hand sign alphabet than the written alphabet.

On skype with Julian this morning, Maggie did a "blast off" countdown: "5 4 2 1 0...blast off!" Points off for missing 3, but extra credit for getting the zero. I'm glad that she knows zero because very few of the kiddie books make any mention of this most-important number/concept.

Run, girl, run!

We took Mag to USC today for the UCLA-USC track meet. The experience of taking her to the UCLA Invitational last month when Tak was in town taught us to only expect her to watch a few events. After a not-so-great early nap, we got in the car and she promptly fell asleep. We got to the track just as the 200's were being run. She was instantly inspired to run! After the meet (we got there 1 hour before the end), she ran onto the track and ran ~1500 m. It wasn't all at once, but it's about 3x more than she runs when we go to the Caltech track.

She enjoyed it so much that she made a commemorative drawing of the event.

proto reading

Feb 25, 2009, 7:45 AM

Looking at her sippy cup, Mag says, "That's a Z, that's a O and that's a O. That spells 'zoo'!"

And so that's how we know that the word "zoo" is printed (in some tiny font) on that sippy cup.

Laughing maniacally,...

she says, "Maggie is laughing because Maggie's tummy is happy!"

This after a dinner of broccolini, yams, wasa crackers and TJ's eggplant hummus.

LED lighting lies

We've been using some AmerTac night lights that I bought at OSH when Maggie was a wee baby. Right on the back of them, they claim to only consume 0.3 W each. They were one of the first things I measured after I built a breakout box to measure the power consumption of household electronics with an ammeter. Lo and behold! the two that I measured use 1.8 and 2.4 Watts! I'll post photos of the rig soon...

Quote of the day (9/17/08)

Maggie walks by a truck she can't identify and says to Nai-nai, "What's that?" Nai-nai doesn't know, so Mag says, "It's UNTHINKABLE!"

Quotes of the day: 9/16/08

[I'm reading "Once a Mouse" to her]

P: What's that? (pointing to a little snake on the ground)
M: A snake!
P: What's that? (pointing to a big snake in a tree)
M: That's a snake, too!
M: (pointing at the little snake) Excuse me, that's a worm!

[Deirdre writes an "M" on a piece of paper for her]
M: Draw an "A"!
D: (DSA writes the A) What comes after that?
M: "G"
D: (write the G) What comes after the "G"?
M: "I"
D: (writes G and I) For your name, there are two "G"'s and then an "I".
P: What comes after "I"?
M: "J"!

[After evening clean-up]
M: Mama's not a guy.... Mama's not Dada.