gal unge

After my day in Oslo, I took a late flight to Stavanger to visit my friend A-B and her family. Here she's translating one of the books I brought for the girls. Recognize it? They read it two or three times in the 2.5 days I was there.

The girls are hilarious, particularly the littler one, at left, who's 3 1/2. The older girl (4 1/2) was sick, so she wasn't all that interactive. But the little one kept telling me things. There were two things that made her difficult to understand: (1) the kids speak a dialect that I totally don't know. It's not even the same as A-B's, which I'm kind of used to. (2) She's three years old. She doesn't speak that clearly. Plus, three-year-olds aren't always totally linear conversationalists. She'd come up to me out of nowhere and tell me, "There's a TOILET on the TRAIN!!!!" (A what on the what now?) Once she ran all the way from the kitchen across the living room to me so she could yell, "This is MY cheese!!!!" Fortunately, she was brandishing a block of cheese, so I caught that pronouncement on the first try.

They also have a 16-month-old boy, also sick, who knew three words - one I can't remember, one that means "it fell" (sort of like saying "uh-oh"), and his favorite, "nei." ("No.") Most of the time I was there he was either asleep or trudging around the house crying, "Nei! Nei!"

Despite the prodigious amounts of snot in that house, I managed to stay healthy. Weird, huh? I almost always get sick when I travel, as Grrrbear can attest.