Laurel came out with a new word today: sailboat. She said it while playing with a puzzle piece painted with same, and then when I called Mom to share the news, she said "I said SAILBOAT!" twice for effect... Amy was slightly cranky to have missed it, but she'll hear more new words soon enough. We're working on teaching her that cats say "meow" since lately everything with four legs (including elk, squirrels and a baby giraffe we saw on the news) says "arf!" to her. Also working on identifying individual Pooh characters, but "tigger" is all she's said so far and not regularly yet...

And we had an exciting Expotition (nods to Pooh) at lunchtime! We took takeout Chinese to Evergreen High School to have lunch with gramma while pop-pop helped assemble holiday baskets with the PTA (for Evergreen Christian Outreach, which operates the local food bank). In addition to dropping rice all over gram, sharing a chewed-on cookie with a student, and eating mostly sauce (instead of sweet-and-sour chicken!), we put on her leash and really got down to fun. She went up and down Main Street (the primary hall) several times, took a side trip down Literature Lane (home of the English department) and up a flight of stairs at its end to look out a door leading to the stairs up to the rec center.

We also got to visit with teachers and other folks in the office and even watched Lee the janitor keeping the school clean and safe (a Very Important Job, and under-appreciated to boot). Laurel got a little fussy towards the end, but she did a very good job climbing all the stairs outside to get up to the car to go home. I'm so proud of her for that, and she's trying to count along when I count stairs for her! She said them out of order, but on the longer flight, she said two, three, four, five and seven several times.