I love you, commenters!

I do. You're like little sparkles of light in a dark, dark void.

No, really. Thank you for commenting, and emailing, and calling, and posting on your own blogs. I like hearing from you.

Also, commenters, those are indeed azalea bushes - I google-imaged them (did you see what I did there, with the verbing?).

And Skipper DID like the penguins. (She only liked the penguins, and the goats at the little farm.) However, she was confused by the underwater-viewing concept. She stared at the swimming penguins for a while, and finally said "Dey flying?" I think I got her straightened out on that, and now she does an excellent penguin imitation that goes like this: "Me penguin! FLAP FLAP FLAP FLAP! Me SWIM like DIS! Me FLYING!"

And it turned out in post-outing debriefing that she had not understood that the animals could not get out of their captivity. So she may have thought the tree shrew was seconds away from clawing her face off with its adorably tiny widdle claws, which makes her response seem a little more sensible. * Probably more sensible, when you consider it, than the people watching the polar bear play with a ball, who were making happy oohing noises and saying "That's so cute!" about an enormous predator practicing its killing skills.

Also, Dutch lost a tooth today, at school.** They gave her a little plastic treasure chest to store it in. (Clearly, our school is spending its scanty budget frivolously.) She was very happy.

* I gave Skipper short shrift in my last post. To be fair, to a person who's never been to zoo and has only been alive for two years, zoos are kind of a challenging thing to figure out. Maybe Skipper was the only child who seemed frightened and wary among the hundreds of children I saw at the zoo because she is extraordinarily thoughtful. Or maybe she had some concerns about the ethics of zoos (when she can talk better, we can discuss the ramifications of keeping our cousins the great apes locked up under display) that she was unable to express, and that was frustrating for her. Alternatively, she could be just utterly nuts.

**Her eighth! She's a dental prodigy.