Vase and Books

This is the vase I posted about yesterday. I'm very happy with it. :-)

And today a nice person in Israel sent me a children's book in Hebrew, as a surprise because she learned I collect kids' books in different languages. Several other people have generously sent me books, too. Here's the collection (well, most of it--the Things have secreted some favorites in their bedrooms):

I've picked some of these up during my travels, some came from friends and family, and some came from swaps. I love the diversity of languages: Hebrew, French, Korean, Chinese (both Mandarin and Cantonese, I believe), Romanian, Portuguese, Czech, German, Russian, Spanish, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Malay, Catalan, Japanese, and Dutch! The Things and I all enjoy looking through these. When T1 was about 3, the Russian and Czech alphabet books were some of her very favorites, and T2 currently is extremely fond of a couple of the Chinese books. I can manage to read and/or partially understand some of the books, but for the most part we just enjoy the pictures. I also like how sometimes you can learn things about a culture just by looking at the pictures.