crumb and and drank every drop.
Dear Diary,
It's funny how Dutch is a tiny bit like English but also not at all like English—depending on how you look at it.
Dad's guidebook says bread is
brood
(Brrode) and butter is
boter
(Bow Ter). Cabbage is
kool
(Kole) and sausage is
worst
(Vorst). Liver is
lever
(Layv Er), which is easy to remember, but who would ever want to order
lever
???
Dad taught us to count to three in Dutch:
1 een (Ayn)
2 twee (Tway)
3 drie (Dree)
I may not be learning much Dutch (much Dutch— that's a rhyme!), but I'm learning other stuff. For instance, Amsterdam is farther north than New York City, so it stays light outside until very late, which means our summer vacation days last extraaaa loooonnng.
Well, Mom wanted to spend all day at the Van Gogh Museum, so Dad said he'd take us for a bike ride and picnic and we'd meet her there later.
Instead of buying picnic food at a big supermarket, like in America, we bought cheese at a cheese shop, fruit at a fruit shop, and bread at a bread shop, and we each took turns paying.
We also bought a box of chocolates. Matt asked Dad, “Can I have one?”
“Not before lunch.”
“Can I poke a hole in one?”
“Absolutely not.”
“But don't you want to know what's inside?”
“I'm a grown-up,” Dad said. “I can wait.”
At the picnic, Matt was chomping on his sandwich and wiggling his tooth. He said that he could push histooth way over with his tongue so that the top of the tooth faced sideways. (Gross!) Then he asked, “Can you stick out your tongue and touch your nose?” All of us, even Dad, tried to touch our noses with our tongues (it must have looked pretty dorky). But none of us could do it. Then Matt said, “I can!” and he stuck out his tongue and touched his nose—
with his finger
.
I didn't know whether to laugh or punch him, but then he said, “My tooth fell out! My tooth fell out!”—only it sounded more like “My toof fell out! My toof fell out!”
A teeny drop of saliva splashed on me, so I said, “Say it, don't spray it. I want the news, not the weather.”
“That is the news,” Matt answered. “I lost my first tooth!” He held it high and smiled a smile with a hole in it.
Cecily said, “Put it someplace safe so you don't lose it twice!” He stuck the tooth in his pants pocket and she gave him a high five. Dad did too. So I did too.
Dear Diary,
Mom noticed the hole in Matt's smile right away, and Matt told her all about it, beaming away as if he were the first person in the history of the world to lose a tooth. Then Mom told all three of us to tie our shoes, and said she doesn't understand why shoelace makers can't make shoelaces that stay tied. She always says that. She says that if we can make rockets that go to other planets, we should be able to make shoelaces that stay tied.
The Van Gogh Museum has over two hundred paintings, five hundred sketches, and seven hundred letters, and Mom said she was going to give us a guided tour. I was worried it was going to be a snooze, but since Mom is so into van Gogh, I decided to act interested. Well guess what? Vincent van Gogh's life was interesting, and his paintings are really really really good. We even got to see the paintings of sunflowers and irises that we had pieced together as puzzles.
Here's the thing. If you step back, you see the subjectthat van Gogh painted, but if you step up close, you see a jumble of different colors. For example, when he painted his own skin, he didn't paint it just skin color. He used green, red, blue, yellow, black, and white. He saw things in lots of ways—depending on the time of day and on how he was feeling—which was often mixed-up and shaky, just like his colors and brush strokes. Some of his paintings actually seem to be moving. Stars twinkle and clouds swirl and flowers bloom or droop right before your very eyes.
Unlike Vermeer's, van Gogh's paintings are not calm.
I've been thinking: maybe my life is like a van
Dear Diary,
It's funny how Dutch is a tiny bit like English but also not at all like English—depending on how you look at it.
Dad's guidebook says bread is
brood
(Brrode) and butter is
boter
(Bow Ter). Cabbage is
kool
(Kole) and sausage is
worst
(Vorst). Liver is
lever
(Layv Er), which is easy to remember, but who would ever want to order
lever
???
Dad taught us to count to three in Dutch:
1 een (Ayn)
2 twee (Tway)
3 drie (Dree)
I may not be learning much Dutch (much Dutch— that's a rhyme!), but I'm learning other stuff. For instance, Amsterdam is farther north than New York City, so it stays light outside until very late, which means our summer vacation days last extraaaa loooonnng.
Well, Mom wanted to spend all day at the Van Gogh Museum, so Dad said he'd take us for a bike ride and picnic and we'd meet her there later.
Instead of buying picnic food at a big supermarket, like in America, we bought cheese at a cheese shop, fruit at a fruit shop, and bread at a bread shop, and we each took turns paying.
We also bought a box of chocolates. Matt asked Dad, “Can I have one?”
“Not before lunch.”
“Can I poke a hole in one?”
“Absolutely not.”
“But don't you want to know what's inside?”
“I'm a grown-up,” Dad said. “I can wait.”
At the picnic, Matt was chomping on his sandwich and wiggling his tooth. He said that he could push histooth way over with his tongue so that the top of the tooth faced sideways. (Gross!) Then he asked, “Can you stick out your tongue and touch your nose?” All of us, even Dad, tried to touch our noses with our tongues (it must have looked pretty dorky). But none of us could do it. Then Matt said, “I can!” and he stuck out his tongue and touched his nose—
with his finger
.
I didn't know whether to laugh or punch him, but then he said, “My tooth fell out! My tooth fell out!”—only it sounded more like “My toof fell out! My toof fell out!”
A teeny drop of saliva splashed on me, so I said, “Say it, don't spray it. I want the news, not the weather.”
“That is the news,” Matt answered. “I lost my first tooth!” He held it high and smiled a smile with a hole in it.
Cecily said, “Put it someplace safe so you don't lose it twice!” He stuck the tooth in his pants pocket and she gave him a high five. Dad did too. So I did too.
Dear Diary,
Mom noticed the hole in Matt's smile right away, and Matt told her all about it, beaming away as if he were the first person in the history of the world to lose a tooth. Then Mom told all three of us to tie our shoes, and said she doesn't understand why shoelace makers can't make shoelaces that stay tied. She always says that. She says that if we can make rockets that go to other planets, we should be able to make shoelaces that stay tied.
The Van Gogh Museum has over two hundred paintings, five hundred sketches, and seven hundred letters, and Mom said she was going to give us a guided tour. I was worried it was going to be a snooze, but since Mom is so into van Gogh, I decided to act interested. Well guess what? Vincent van Gogh's life was interesting, and his paintings are really really really good. We even got to see the paintings of sunflowers and irises that we had pieced together as puzzles.
Here's the thing. If you step back, you see the subjectthat van Gogh painted, but if you step up close, you see a jumble of different colors. For example, when he painted his own skin, he didn't paint it just skin color. He used green, red, blue, yellow, black, and white. He saw things in lots of ways—depending on the time of day and on how he was feeling—which was often mixed-up and shaky, just like his colors and brush strokes. Some of his paintings actually seem to be moving. Stars twinkle and clouds swirl and flowers bloom or droop right before your very eyes.
Unlike Vermeer's, van Gogh's paintings are not calm.
I've been thinking: maybe my life is like a van
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