my mother's birthday

Last weekend it was my mother's birthday. My cousin came over and she brought a poppy seed cake with orange and lemon frosting. She gave us all presents and we played Quick Scrabble with her. My mother made tiramisu and and my father  made a nutty orange cake as well as roast duck. All the food was delicious! We watched a movie together called "Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes". It is the prequel to "Planet Of The Apes" and it is about a drug that makes all apes really clever. The apes at the zoo are treated cruelly, so when they get the drug, they find out ways to escape  and get the zoo keepers back for being mean to them. The drug is infectious, though, and when humans get it, as well as being cleverer, they get a virus. The virus kills them, but the movie ends at that point and you have to watch the second one to find out what happens next. We haven't watched it yet, but we want to.

Our new friend

There is a girl in my school  from Iran who joined the school two months ago. She doesn't speak a lot of English, but my mother sometimes comes to help her one-to-one when the school asks her. The girl came to our house today and we played Monopoly and had pizza and pancakes  with her. She was a little shy at first, but when we tried to say some Farsi words, our pronunciation was so bad that we all couldn't stop laughing about it and the girl seemed less shy after that. We also played a really boring shopping  game that we stopped playing almost as soon as we started.

I just remembered that a while ago, just after we first met the girl, we watched a movie in the British Museum about marsh-dwellers who have lived the same way for around five thousand years. They spear fish, make reed carpets (sometimes two in a day!)and sell buffaloes. The sad thing is that they are being pushed out of their land because the rivers are two polluted to fish from and a lot of land has been given up for government projects.

Making toothpaste

Today my mum showed me how to make toothpaste. She laid a dishcloth out on the kitchen counter to prevent it from getting it messy, and my sister and I poured and stirred the ingredients. All we needed was some vegetable glycerine, orange flavour essential oil and bentonite clay. 


Bentonite clay is a sediment of volcanic ash and is good for absorbing toxins. Glycerine also has healing qualities but vegetable glycerine is safer because it is a better grad.


We mixed the glycerine and clay in a little brown jar till it got to the right consistency. Then, we added about two drops of the essential oil to the mixture and stirred some more. After that, we tried the toothpaste out. It was very grainy from the clay, and the vegetable glycerine made it a warm kind of sweet. I hadn't ever tried orange flavour toothpaste before today, so it was a nice change from the ordinary mint.

Even though it isn't cheaper to make toothpaste yourself, it is better than buying it because you know what the ingredients are and you don't have to have toothpaste with chemicals in it if you don't want to. It is also good because you can make up your own flavours.

London Streetfood Bank Part 4

I went with my mum to collect and distribute sandwiches from Pret yesterday. Usually in other branches, the staff are snappy and act like it is a hassle letting us into the shop when it  has already closed, but in this shop, the staff were really friendly; they smiled at us and even gave me and my mum a hot wrap each for us to eat. That made me smile.

When we went to the Strand to distribute the sandwiches, some of the people kept asking for a different flavour sandwich to what we were offering them. At first, I thought that they were just being fussy; if they have been hungry all day, why can't they just appreciate what they have been given, instead of being difficult and asking for something else? But then, I thought, ''Why can't they choose what they want. If people like us, who aren't as hungry as them can choose what kind of sandwich we want, why can't they?"

Each time I do the sandwich run I learn something new that helps me to see things differently.

A different swimming pool

My father took me and my sister to swimming pool that we'd never been to before today. I wanted to go because at my swimming classes, my teacher told us to to a forward roll in the water and I wanted to practice that. She also told us to do a backwards roll, which I have no idea how to do! In the lesson before the last one, she told us to jump off the diving board which is something I'd never done before she told me to. Luckily, it was the small one that we had to use, although near the end of the class, she let us try the scary one. I have a fear that we will be forced to use that one next time. I have an even worse fear that we will be forced to dive off it (which is really, what diving boards are meant for.).


Another reason I wanted to go to the swimming pool was because I needed to practice a certain kind of stroke which we will be doing next week. My dad said that I was good at it, but I still think I need more practice.

Timed Free-Writing

The clouds drifted across the cold, grey sky.


The apple the eye, poison, the pie, the people who posed with smiles.


Tinkle, twinkle, in the sky; in the darkness catch my eye.


Blue and free is worry free, rivers dashing reflect your light


Foam rock stops me, so I must climb over the large soldiers clad in green.


Who dared run and who dared fly, no-one but I, no-one but I.

London Streetfood Bank Part 3

I took a few weeks break from delivering sandwiches to homeless people, but I've started again now.

I usually go with my mother, but recently I went with my father. He was quite good at handing out the sandwiches seeing as it was his first time. You may be wondering how one can be good at handing out sandwiches. Here's how: Firstly, you can't drop the food (That one is a bit obvious!). Secondly, you have to hand the sandwiches out to the right people because there are alot of greedy people who want all the sandwiches for themselves. There are also some people who take the free sandwiches and sell them for like four pounds each or something. Then, there are those shy people who stay at the back of the crowd. You need to make sure they get some as well. You can't avoid giving sandwiches to all the mean looking people, you just need to make sure you don't give them all to the same people. Lastly, you yourself can't be shy.

After me and my dad gave out the sandwiches, we went to a shop called Tutti Frutti to buy ourselves some frozen yoghurt. My nineteen year old cousin surprised and impressed everone by buying the Tutti Frutti franchise from the US. It was my first time going to the shop, so I was quite excited. Me and my dad used a voucher we'd been given and bought ourselves a tub of yoghurt each. There were self-service machines there where you could  choose how much of what flavour yoghurt you wanted to have. You could also choose your own toppings. There were strawberries, oreos, twix bar peices and lots more things. 


I enjoyed that trip out. Not just because of the yoghurt, though.