Guus Bosman

Today Nora saw her first cow. We visited the Frying Pan Farm in Herndon, about 30 minutes away.

Nora woke up 6.45 am, early for her, so she was a little tired but she greatly enjoyed seeing all the animals. We arrived at the farm a little after 9.00 am and the first thing we saw from the parking lot were a cow and a bull, grazing in a pasture. Nora first thought was "paard" (horse), since those she had seen before.

Frying Pan Farm is a beautiful farm and great fun for kids and adults. We saw lots of animals: cows, sheep, horses, pigs, goats, turkeys, peacocks, chickens... Nora was impressed. The animals dutifully made all sorts of noises. We heard the roosters crow, and the cows were mooing. The goats were a little scary.

I also pointed out some of the farm machines, including the plow (ploeg) and when we gave Nora a sandwich later and asked: "wat zagen we op de boerderij?" (what did we see on the farm?), she answered: "ploeg!".

We were in Barnes and Noble today and bought two books for Nora. One was a Richard Scarry picture book, the other was: "Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes". We gave this as a baby gift a year ago, and really loved the story and the rhyme. When we read books to Nora we want to do that in Bulgarian and Dutch, and I've translated several American books so far.

Translating it into Dutch was not easy. How to do justice to these iconic lines?

And both of these babies,
as everyone knows,
had ten little fingers
and ten little toes.

I ran several translations by Nora, and while the Dutch word "teentjes" is very cute, she seemed to prefer "tenen". There is actually an official translation, and on Bol.com I saw a few pages of it, but the meaning and the rhythm of the book was modified too much for my taste, even introducing names for the babies in the book which is a distraction.

We asked Nora, "waar is de koe" and she pointed to her cow and said "koe". Then we asked "къде е кравичка?" and she pointed to the cow again and said "вича".

When I asked "wat zegt de koe" she dutifully answered "boe!" and when Sasha asked the same thing in Bulgarian she said "муууу!", much to our delight.

I gave her a new book to read for dinner and it had a picture of a bird. She said "duif?" and then "ogetje" (for "vogeltje"), followed by "tjielp tjielp!"