Carusone told CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric tonight that she was having breakfast a few days ago with Giffords, who had oatmeal and yogurt, when she asked for toast. Giffords is now eating three meals a day — as her husband, Mark Kelly, announced Tuesday on Facebook — and as she did Monday, speaking is the latest sign of progress. They deal with these challenges by answering the oft-repeated question: “What would Gabby want?” 
 
 At the center of the entire Giffords operation is her 30-year-old chief of staff, Pia Carusone, who has been running Giffords’s Tucson and Washington offices from spartan side rooms at Houston’s TIRR Memorial Hermann hospital with her BlackBerry, a Mac computer and a tiny, 3-by-5-inch reporter’s notebook containing four weeks’ worth of daily to-do lists. Carusone was at home in Washington on Jan. 8 when an aide called to tell her there had been a shooting. Carusone had just spoken with Giffords’s mother when the news broke.
– Another milestone in Gabrielle Giffords' recovery: She's starting to speak for the first time since last month's shooting. As noted first by Politico, she asked for toast with breakfast earlier this week and since then has been speaking "more and more," a spokesman tells AP. “It’s huge and it’s great,” he adds to the Arizona Daily Star. "It’s very big news and we are all very excited.” Husband Mark Kelly said Giffords is eating three times a day and enjoying it, "even though it's hospital food," he wrote in a Facebook post. "The doctors say she is recovering at lightning speed considering her injury but they aren't kidding when they say this is a marathon process."