This week

I went swimming twice this week. The first time I went with my mum and practiced the different strokes and did somersaults in the water. The hard thing about the somersaults is the water gets up your nose, so you have to blow the air out through your nose while spinning. Another thing that makes it difficult is you have to do it in the deep end so you don't bang your head, so when you come up for air when you've finished, you don't know which way to swim to get to the shallow end Where you can stand.  The second time my dad took me but I played instead of practicing. When I went with my dad, there was a rude girl there of about six years old. I really didn't like her.

Before that, though, I learnt the Jabberwocky poem. There is a nonsense word in the poem called "slithy" It sounds like one of those words that come to you while you're playing Scrabble or Boggle and you aren't sure if they exist and have to look up in the dictionary. It was so much fun learning "The Jabberwocky" I just love those made-up words in it! My sister learnt it too and we kept interrupting each other when one of us was reciting it. That caused some arguing. Part of the reason we memorized the poem was because we'd just watched the second Alice In Wonderland movie and in it one of the characters says it.

I just remembered that yesterday I went to the Museum of Childhood. We made goblin puppets and looked at an exhibition about magic. There were videos showing magic tricks, but not how they were done. There were also optical illusions and photos and pictures of magicians like Paul Daniels and Derren Brown. There were old magic sets and props, too, like a cupboard kind of thing for a trick a bit like the one where a woman gets cut in half. After we went there my mum took us to a book shop called Foyles and we spent more than three hours there, browsing, reading and walking around. Mum bought me a book called Look Into My Eyes by Lauren Child. It is a Ruby Redfort book. I thought of reading it on the train on my way home, but I was in the middle of reading a really good book from the library and I didn't want to start another one before finishing it. By the way, the "really good book" is called The Pickle King.

A few days ago we had a couchsurfing party. My sister and I made menus for the food there and on them we replaced the names of the food we were having with things that  a witch might put in her cauldron, like "Soup Of The desert" for chickpea and lentil soup and "Black Mud Cake" for  chocolate cake. When my friend arrived, he helped me name the drinks. We called coke "Dragon's Blood" and put everybody off their drinks by telling them the names we made up. The names weren't actually that disgusting, but people just didn't like the idea of drinking cranberry juice that was blood.