"I went hang-gliding at Birchip and made myself a hay-house"
I'm eight years old. My birthday is in January. I'm always looking forward to my birthday!! It's my half-birthday soon.
I live in Renmark. It's a small town in the Riverland of South Australia.
It is very very hot here (up to 48 deg C) in the summer, and it is a bit cold in the winter, but we don't have snow.
This is a desert place, but we can live here because we are close to a very big river ... the Murray River.
It's the third biggest river in the whole world!
about what I do
I go to school at St Joseph's primary school in Renmark.
I'm in Year 3. My teachers are Mrs. Grimes and Mrs. Winderlich and they are nice.
I changed to St Joseph's this year, because there were no other Vietnamese kids at the town primary school, and I wanted to have Vietnamese friends as well as Anglo and Punjabi and Greek and Russian and...
[Mum: we have 63 different nationalities in the Riverland!]I like school because we get to write stories, and mystery stories.
I have my Junior green belt and last month I was Pixie of the month again, together with Gurjit!
Kancho Sensei says we both tried very hard.
He says: when you try, you are already a winner!
I have just started playing netball.
My friend Trân plays too, and her mum, my cô (auntie) Trang, takes us to netball.
When I started, I was worried that I didn't know how to play.
But everyone didn't know how to play, when they started :-)
My team wears maroon skirts and our school tops, and I have new sports shoes with bubble-windows in them, and tiger stripes!
Last week I played 'Goal Defence', and we won by a lot of points :-)
I have played 'Centre' too!
I am very lucky. I have got lots of friends:
(here are only some of them, because I can't remember everyone!, in alphabetical order so nobody feels 'first' or 'last' friend)
Allira, Ben, Caterina, Daniel, Ebony, Elice, Emma 1, Emma 2, Hàng, Isabella, Jacquie, Joanna, Katherine, Kieran, Lindsay, Linh, Luke, Ryan, Selina, Thiên, Trân, Vivienne, and me (I'm my friend too ;-)
I have lots of fun playing with my friends.
We do running races. We pretend we're little puppies sometimes. We pretend to eat hair: brown hair is chocolate and fair hair is white chocolate! I pretend that I'm a little kitten that is looking for food on the ground or in other people's opened lunchboxes (the people chase me and then I put the food back!). We like talking a lot. Our playground isn't fixed yet, but we hope it will be soon.
This is my family.
From the left, first you don't see my big brother ['anh' in Vietnamese].
Well, you don't see him because he said grumpily, "I don't want to be on the Internet", and that is up to him. He asked us to cut him out of the photo.
He has nearly finished High School.
When he is not glued to the computer, sometimes he growls at me and sometimes he mucks around with me.
He can make really good monster faces. :-)
So the first person you can see in the picture is my adopted Dad [cha].
His name is Pete (Peet).
I adopted him and he adopted me.
He flies aeroplanes and works with computers on the Internet.
He turns me upside down and gives me whizzies ... Wheeeeeeee!!!!! :-)
Then you can see my Mum [me.].
Her name is Clytie (Kl-eye-tee), and I am sitting on her knee.
My Mum is mostly in bed because she is sick.
She is a teacher, so I can ask her lots of things.
I get in bed with her, and we talk and read stories and cuddle :-)
On the right is my big sister Sian (Shahn) [chi.].
She is a grown-up now, so she has left school and is studying away from home.
She wants to learn about animal behaviour (we have lots of animal behaviour in our house :-)
She has moved to Geelong which is a long way away from here.
I miss her a lot. :-(
But she comes to visit, and we talk on the phone and giggle a lot, and we can email.
When she comes to visit again soon, she said she would help me put pretty nail-polish on my fingernails. I like dressing up! :-)
I found Max when we were walking along the floodbanks.
He was a little kitten, but so thin that you could see his skeleton.
He was starving.
Mum and Pete decided we could keep him.
Max likes to be cuddled, and purrs really loudly.
Most of all, he likes EATING! :-)
He is a fat black cat and very lazy.
He was very sick recently when he got an abscess on his foot. He didn't like going to the vet, but he did like being babied and fed tablets! He is much better now :-)
Su Tu means "lion" in Vietnamese.
Sometimes we call him Sooty, too. ;-)
He is older than me, very big and very hairy!
When he was a puppy, he used to sleep in Mum's Ugh boot ... now, when he comes in the house, he spreads all over the floor and you can't get around him!
He can howl just like a wolf, and complains really loudly when he doesn't think he is getting enough attention.
We lent him to the Police Force for a while, so he was a Police Dog, but he got sore hips so he came home again and just looks after us now.
He loves going in the back of Mum's car, going for W-A-L-K-s and shaking water all over you when he comes out of the river.
Tsunami is a Japanese word, meaning a tidal wave caused by an underwater earthquake.
If you have ever been close to this dog when it comes out of the river or in the front door, you know why we called her Tsunami!
She is the WAGGIEST dog I have ever seen!
She pants and wriggles and licks and bumps you, and she even knows how to SPELL w-a-l-k...
She gets very very excited and jumps up and down.
Other times, she sleeps a lot.
She tries to sleep on the couch, but she is too big and keeps slipping off.
She sits on the couch and rests her muzzle on the edge of the couch-arm, staring out the window.
She is a very good watch dog.
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