Lucy and her Daddy

Everyone in my house knows that Lucy has a very special attachment to her Daddy. Every single day she shows us how much he means to her.
This evening, while Greg was on a bike ride, I was reading a book with Lucy. Rebecca was merrily doing some solo imaginative play in her room, so Lucy had my full attention. We were reading Thumper counts to ten. Now, while Lucy has recently developed a very keen interest in books, she still can't sit through an entire book. Therefore, I was shocked when we actually reached number nine. On each page of the book, the numbers are represented by woodland creatures. Nine is quail. One big quail and a trail of eight baby quails. I told Lucy that these birds were called quail (although she still said "quack quack"), and look - it's a Mommy quail with her babies. At that point she pointed to the big quail (Lucy does a lot of pointing these days) and said "Daddy". It fascinated me that she interpreted the picture in this way. To me, it was a mommy and babies picture - I made the assumption, without even a nanosecond of thinking. Automatic processing. Probably accurate representation of what happens in nature. But to her, these parental scene does not just default to "Mommy". I don't want to overinterpret, but I would like to imagine that this might be a sign that by having Greg as the at-home parent, Lucy has the notion that a nurturing parent is not just limited to being a Mommy. As long as she doesn't think it's a role exclusive to Daddies, then I think it is a wonderful thing that might be happening in her brain.