Guus Bosman

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.

It's the Fourth today and we walked in the Lyon Village Parade this morning.

The parade is a short walk along Key Boulevard, and several classic cars participated as well as Uncle Sam. Nora was deeply impressed by the fire trucks that also took part. We've been reading about the "brandweer" for a while now and it was fun to see them in real life, if a little scary.

At 12:30 pm Nora went for her nap. When she wakes up, the Zane family will be almost here. They're visiting us for the first time in the new house.

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!"