Goodbye

Hello. I am very sad. Scriggle and Shake have passed away. That's why I made this little movie for them, to always remember them. I would like to thank the Sylvanians for caring so much and being part of this. Please pray for them, though I am sure they are fine somewhere in Heaven. I think that Wiggle must be very lonely now, but I think he is adjusting. Bye bye Scriggle and Shake.

Here's Wiggle. I hope he is fine. He is eating dried apples and wholewheat bread. By himself. 

Coppelia

Hello everyone! How have you been? I'm sure you've been having lots of fun if it's your school holidays too. Let me share with you what we did on Day 2 of the holidays! See the big picture up there? Yup, we went to see the ballet Coppelia! As you might know, I study ballet, so I was really excited to be going.

Coppelia is a comic ballet in three acts. It is about an inventor named Dr Coppelius, who has made a life-sized dancing doll. It is so lifelike that everyone thinks she is real, including Franz, one of the lead dancers. He falls in love with her, and Dr Coppelius tries to take his spirit to magically bring Coppelia to life. He does this by giving Franz some wine which has a sleeping powder in it. But Franz's true love Swanhilde rescues him by dressing up as the doll and pretending to come to life instead. She wakes Franz up and winds up all Dr Coppelius' dolls to help them escape.

Here I am dancing outside the concert hall during the intermission. I took off my dress shoes!

Wheee! Dancing is fun! 

Here we are after the intermission, waiting for the third act to start.

After the performance, we walked around the Esplanade for a bit. Here we are looking at some camera thing that they set up for the Mosaic Music Festival. You can stand in front of it and have your picture taken. I'm not sure what that has to do with the festival.

Here we are in front of a huge work of art made up of a whole bunch of paper birds.

This is what it looks like!

Here I am outside of the Esplanade posing with a piano sculpture that looks like it was made up of Christmas tree lights.

 This is one half of the Esplanade at night.

And here we are just sitting and dreaming of our next adventure! See you again soon!

My Little Friends!

Hello there! These are my mealworms Wiggle, Scriggle and Shake! I adopted them from school, where they had been part of a Science class. I am now keeping them in a container with lots of holes for air, and feeding them dried oats and mushy apples. Here is a little movie of my mealworms made by my Mom -- please enjoy!

And here are some pictures!

 

Here is a picture of my worms in their container home.

 

Here they are enjoying their oatmeal!

 

This is Scriggle! He is luxuriating in his food.

 

And here's Wiggle and Shake playing together.  See you again soon!

Happy March Holidays!

Hello everyone! I am having a one-week March holiday! Yippee!

We had a wonderful start to our holidays -- we went to see the Disney on Ice: Princesses & Heroes ice-skating show!

Look! It's Minnie Mouse! She and Mickey and Tinkerbell were the hosts of the show.

This was the scene for Aladdin. It was like an Arabian marketplace.

 

Here is Aladdin meeting the genie. I think it must be hard to skate when you are all covered up in that fat blue costume. 

 

It's rich Aladdin and Princess Jasmine! They are heading down to do a romantic dance.

  

The seven dwarfs! Except they were more like seven strange grownup men.

  

It's Belle doing a cancan dance with forks and spoons! And a giant candelabra.

  

Here are all the sea creatures in the underwater scene!

  

These are some crazy dancing octopus things.

 

It's Ariel! She is my favourite princess. 

 

Hello Ariel! 

 

That's the dragon from Sleeping Beauty. It was huge and shot out fire from its mouth at the prince -- cool!

  Cinderella arriving at the ball. Isn't her carriage nice? 

 

This is Tinkerbell at the finale. The carriage she was in rose up into the air and fireworks came out from it!

  

Here we are after the show. I'm holding my Ariel teacup souvenir! 

 

Here we are waiting for dinner at our favourite Japanese restaurant. We are looking at our show tickets. 

 

This is me making my maki face. Kani maki is favourite (that's the crab meat one).

We had a great time! See you again soon! 

Staycation!

Hi everybody!! How have you been? Today I thought I would share with you some pictures from my little holiday over the weekend! My Mom calls it a "staycation", which means a vacation you spend in your home country.

We stayed at our favourite hotel. They are always so nice to us there! Here you can see us having orange juice because our room wasn't ready yet.

My little sister and I love staycations because we get to do all sorts of fun things that we don't do at home. Like lounging about all day doing art and crafts and watching TV at the same time!

The hotel bathroom is so nice and big. They give us lots of huge towels and awesome-smelling shampoos and soaps. Here I am after one of my baths. I am wearing my abominable snowman pajamas.

We had bubble baths every day. My sister and I love playing "restaurant" in the tub. We serve each other food and drinks that we make out of bubbles!

Of course, I got to do a lot of swimming, which I love!

And I went into the jacuzzi too!

This was a crow who came to look at us at the pool every day. Sometimes he -- or maybe she -- drank water from the pool. I don't know if that was good for him. My Mom said he almost pooped on her. One way you can tell a crow from a raven is that a crow doesn't have a tuft of hair on its bill. So this is a crow.

We got to eat tons of yummy food too! Here I am having breakfast -- sausages and bacon and scrambled eggs, plus hot chocolate, juice and fruit -- yum!!

We ate out too, which is always fun. Here I am having biscotti with my hot chocolate while waiting for my cheesy baked rice.

We went shopping, and also played games at the mall. Here, my sister and I are playing the "jumping squares" game. We jump on the big tiles according to the numbers and directions my Mom calls out. The winner is the one who reaches her first.

That day I brought Monkey with me. He looks a little concerned because he doesn't get out much.

We also went to the arcade, where I played my favourite drumming game about five times! If you play well, you get coupons that you can exchange for gifts.

One really exciting thing that happened was the lion dance right in the hotel! I'd never been so close to one before.

The lions were really cute and did lots of cool things. They threw lots of oranges and vegetables at us. I caught one orange that they had thrown, and put my hand in one lion's mouth to get another! Here, you can see the lettuce that they had just spat out at everybody. The lettuce had been hung up really high and they had to do acrobatics to get it down. The Chinese word for "vegetables" sounds like the word for "fortune". In this picture, they are doing things in their tummies with a whole tray of oranges.

When they got up, we saw that they had peeled all the oranges and made all kinds of Chinese idioms with them. This one is "feng sheng shui qi".

The time came for us to say goodbye to our beloved hotel room. Here I am hugging the bed. I'm really glad we could have such a nice little break like that. It's good to rest and relax sometimes don't you think! I'm already planning my next staycation haha! See you soon!

Fruit or Vegetable?

 

Here's Molly Mouse and Harland Sheepdog having their breakfast! Molly is telling Harland about the homework she got back from Mrs Roo yesterday. Their class has been studying food groups, she explained, and she had classified tomatoes as a "vegetable" and not a "fruit". 

"I don't know why Mrs Roo said it was wrong," Molly told Harland sadly.

"Well, did she explain to you all what exactly a fruit is, and what exactly a vegetable is?" asked Harland.

"No..." Molly replied slowly.

"Then how would you know?" Harland asked.

"I don't know! Maybe it's something we're supposed to just know in our hearts!" Molly said.

"That's just silly," Harland said. "First, you have to know what makes a fruit a fruit, and what makes a vegetable a vegetable. But I can tell you why tomatoes are fruits and not vegetables. My Daddy helps take care of the garden and he knows all about it. He told me that if it has seeds, then it is a fruit. So, tomatoes are fruits. That also makes things like cucumbers, peppers and squash fruit. Of course, we also eat other parts of the plant, like the leaves or stems; those are vegetables".

"But you know," Harland continued, "My Daddy told me that the Supreme Court in a faraway country called the United States ruled that the tomato is a vegetable. They said that only if it was eaten in hand or in a dessert could it be classified as a fruit. Consumers think of tomatoes as vegetables, and that is how they should be legally defined".

"Ooh, you're really smart!" Molly said, impressed. "Thank you for explaining to me! Although I think then that a tomato could be a fruit or a vegetable, depending on if you were talking to a botanist or a chef!"

"You're right!" Harland said, and they both laughed and ate their tomato salad.

My Sylvanian Chronicles

Hello everybody!!! How have you been?? I know, it's been awhile hasn't it! Happy new year!!! I've been so busy, first with the school holidays, and now with school! I'm in a higher grade now, and I have new teachers, classmates and subjects. My days start very early now and then when I get home, I do my homework and play with my sister, or go for ballet, or practice the piano, or meet up with my friends -- so you see I have lots to do.

I have been thinking of my Sylvanians and their adventures though, so I decided to quickly write the next chapter of their story now! Remember what happened last time? If you can't you can find it here.

There was a lot of excitement because at last the Sylvanians had caught the intruder! It was a big orange cat from the Outside World! Everyone noticed that the orange cat was shivering. It did not look well or happy. Mr Owl went to get Matron from the sick bay just in case it fainted or something.

 

Everyone let Mr Walnut Cat speak to it, because after all, he is also a cat. "We have caught you at last," he said sternly. It was the voice he always used when he was scolding the kids, which they hated. "You have been stealing our food and doing goodness knows what else. That is very naughty indeed. But now that we've caught you, you had better tell us who you are".

 

And this was what the orange cat did when it heard Mr Walnut Cat's scoldy voice. Immediately, everyone went "Awww". Matron said, "Poor thing, you're shivering with cold and you look very hungry. I think you have a bit of a temperature too. Come to the sick bay and rest. You can have some cookies and hot chocolate and in the morning when you feel better you can tell us all about yourself".

 

So everyone led the orange cat up to the sick bay. Only Hester Honeyfox was there and she was already asleep. She had been having her usual sniffly nose from smelling too many flowers. Mr Owl said he would stay up with Matron to watch the orange cat since he usually didn't sleep at night anyway. Matron was glad to have him around to chat to. Staying up alone all night could be pretty boring.

They gave the orange cat some hot chocolate and put it to bed. It seemed to be really exhausted by everything that had happened, and did not even want any cookies. It lay down in bed with a grateful sigh and was soon purring in its sleep. "The poor thing is worn out," whispered Matron to Mr Owl. "What an interesting life it must lead". Mr Owl nodded and stared at the cat in that way owls do. "I wonder what we'll find out tomorrow!" he said.

What do you think is in store for the Sylvanians and their strange intruder? Stay tuned to find out!

P.S. I've put all the chapters of this story together here in case you missed any part! Ch 1, Ch 2, Ch 3, Ch 4. See you again soon!