things that make me go, hmmm

"Sixty percent of all rural households in poor countries keep livestock, according to the FAO's RIGA database of households in 12 third world countries, plus Bulgarian and Albania."

That's a pretty interesting statement for a host of reasons, but when I saw that, it struck me that that's awful close to another households with animals ratio. But I didn't know the number off the top of my head (just a feeling, that it was really close to that sixty percent). Wikipedia to the rescue:

From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pet

"Around 63 percent of all U.S. households (71.1 million) have pets, and more than half of these households have more than one animal." A very superficial attempt to track the source on that failed, and honestly? Same number to the single significant digit, which made me a little nervous. I did a little looking around, and sure enough, there's a trade association conducting a regular survey:

http://www.americanpetproducts.org/press_industrytrends.asp

According to which:

"According to the 2009/2010 National Pet Owners Survey, 62% of U.S. households own a pet, which equates to 71.4 millions homes"

I can't speak to the details on the survey, because the trade association is only willing to share with non-member if they're willing to cough up $1600+ for the privilege. No thank you.

I'm not prepared to speculate what it all means, but that is an interesting coincidence.

Today's activities include: preschooler on the phone

When I was in the hospital (briefly) with appendicitis, or, rather, the morning after the surgery for same, I talked on the phone with my husband, R. We discussed mostly how things were going with the kids and as a result, I suggested having R. try to get T. to at least listen to my voice on the phone. We had never been able to get him to _talk_ on the phone altho, like A., he liked to pretend to be on the phone. Unlike A., his pretending did not typically extending to vocalizing, nonsense words or otherwise.

But in this amazing instance, he actually did say a few words, and it was clear he was listening to me and it seemed to help him cope with waking up in the morning and me not being there.

Today, a friend called, and T. picked up the phone in the other room: very appropriate developmentally for a five year old. He didn't press the talk button, but he did walk over towards me and look at me with a smile. So I pushed the talk button and told him to say hi to the person on the line. And he did.

This may not be amazing to you, but it's pretty amazing to me. He was excited enough about it he wanted to do it again a couple minutes later. I'm thinking it's time to start having regular phone calls to grandma.