On the Bucket Filling Train

"J for Joe!"  (And jaguar.)

In other bucket filling news, Julie has been trying to do more laundry throughout the week, and some weeks, trying to clean a good portion of the house on Friday nights, so that she can hang out properly with Clara on Saturday morning before Clara's Super Beats class at The Little Gym.  Julie had been thinking about how to engineer more play time with Clara, but got really serious about it after the week the boys left--and Clara raced for her little toy vacuum cleaner.  So lately on Saturday mornings, Julie and Clara have been doing puzzles.  The first week when they didn't vacuum and the like, they worked the Melissa and Doug alphabet train puzzle.  It features a long circus train in which each car has a letter on it containing an animal that start with that same letter.  After Clara had turned all the pieces right side up and found A, Julie asked what letter came next.  That's how it went, with intermittent alphabet singing, until they got to N.  Now, it's true, this reporter can't think of an animal right off the top of her head that begins with N.  But she bets that if she really put her mind to it, she could come up with one better than narwal, which is a fish, which starts with F, which is therefore very confusing to people still learning their letters and who might, perhaps, be running out of patience 14 letters in to this circus train of alphabet fun.  Really, Melissa?  Doug?  Narwal?  In Julie's opinion, they also dropped the ball when they chose skunk for S.  Isn't snake sort of the classic S animal?  (For our Fans out there who have already let their mind go to the always obvious problem of X, we will tell you that Melissa and Doug went with an animal ending in X: fox, with an underscored X.)  So Clara was sort of our of sorts when it came to the N.  But she made it past the N, and got all the animals on the train.

Almost there. . .

Choo-choo!