Guus Bosman

When I put Nora in the car tonight she said: "zebra! zebra!" and she pointed to our neighbor's fence. I was wondering what she meant: did she mean a striped pattern of shadows? And then I saw it...

We went to pick up Sasha and when we parked at home I asked Nora to tell mama about the zebra. Nora pointed again to the fence and said: "zebra! zebra!" Sasha kept looking for the zebra but couldn't find it.

Nora is starting to learn the letters of the alphabet and Lelya Snezha teaches those letters with names. So there is 'м' for мама, 'O' for Oma and 'т' for тати (that's me). She is learning the Cyrillic letters, so she knows that Я is for ягода (strawberry). When she saw the letter R on a box, she told me: ягода. I explained that this was the R -- and the first word that came to my mind was rommel so I said "de R voor Rommel". She misheard that and the next day said "R voor Trommel", which she then later correctly translated as "барабани"...

So tonight, she saw the З for Зебра...