The first word. Cat. Clear as day.

She articulated it quite deliberately as she examined two cute white kitties in a cage at Petco, Nate tells me.

I’m not entirely surprised; Thalia had been working on cat for days now. The fascinating part to me is that she was able to identify two cute white kitties as the same species as the horrible hissing black beast she usually sees around the house.

It’s not as if I didn’t get my own awesome experience in its stead. Why right at that very same moment that my daughter was uttering her first word yesterday, I was somewhere over the Rockies, staring across the airplane cabin at a guy who looked almost like a celebrity.

That kind of thing happens on the New York to LA flights all the time. It’s crazy that way.