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.