Tristan's Blog

Many people would call me a picky eater, but when I like something I like it a lot. The most perfect breakfast is either pancakes cooked by my dad with lots of love or waffles cooked by my mom with tons of love. They taste so awesome that I wish I could have that type of  breakfast every day! My favourite food for lunch is tea biscuits or chicken noodle soup. I like tea biscuits best because I drown them with Rogers Golden syrup after spreading butter on them. If you would like the recipe for these you can find it in my last post. Chicken noodle soup is my second favourite mostly because my sister always wants perogies or Kraft Dinner and I don’t like either of these. What I like best for dinner is mash potatoes with gravy or fajitas. I always shape my potatoes into a volcano and pretend the gravy is lava running down the sides and if we have broccoli I make believe the broccoli are trees and the lava burns the trees down. The lava burns other vegetables down as well which takes away the bad taste. If you don’t like some vegetables like me try the lava trick.

My most of all favourite thing to eat is the yummy dessert known as Chocolate Pudding Cake! I wish it was a meal because I would have it all the time. It’s chocolate cake that’s hot from the oven with pudding running  down the sides. If I know it’s coming I run to the table and if you knew me I usually need to get called at least 3 times before that happens.

Sometimes we go to restaurants. Some of my favourites are Boston Pizza and White Spot. White Spot is great because it has booths with TVs and pirate ships as meal holders. These make my time there really fun.  I like going to Boston Pizza on my birthday because they make everyone in the restaurant sing happy birthday to you. Kids like this more than adults, but I still try to get happy birthday sung to my mom and dad because I want to make them feel special.

All this writing makes me feel hungry enough to eat this computer! I better go grab something to eat. I’m wondering what your favourite foods are?

image: Culinary Architecture by B Tal released under a CC Attribution – Noncommercial license

I think my dad is awesome! He’s lots of fun because he knows a lot about board games so I learn to play them with him. My favourite ones are Battlelore, Zooloretto and Settlers of Catan. These games are really different from each other but I enjoy learning strategies to help me win. In Battlelore I like being a rock monster and battling giant spiders, in Zooloretto I like the pandas and building my own zoo, and in Settlers of Catan I like building settlements that I can turn into cities when I get enough resources. My dad owns many more games and really likes playing them. He gets them from specialty game stores or online and most of them are made in Europe. A lot of his games have won different awards too. He finds out if they are good games on a site called Board Game Geek.

He also makes the best tea biscuits ever! They are so fluffy on the inside and delicious. They taste best when they are fresh out of the oven with Rogers Golden syrup. If you’d like to know how to make them here is his recipe:

• 2 cups flour
• 1 tablespoon sugar
• 1 tablespoon baking powder
• 1/3 cup shortening
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 cup milk (but my dad uses water because my mom is allergic to milk)
• 3 cups of love

After you mix the ingredients together you bake them at 425 degrees F.

My awesome dad also makes really good pancakes and they’re so delicious that I always have at least two of them, but I often end up having four. He also helps me on video games when I get to a really hard part like on the Boo house in New Super Mario Bros. Wii because he’s really good and his skills are legendary. 

My dad travels to places I’d like to see one day and always tells me stories about them when he gets back. He has already been to France, Spain, Italy, and Greece in Europe. He saw the Roman Coliseum and ancient ruins in Rome and the statue of David in Florence, the Parthenon and Temple of Zeus in Athens and the ruins in Delphi, the Eiffel Tower and Louvre in Paris, and the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. He’s also been to Las Vegas twice. In Las Vegas he was close to the Hoover Dam and Grand Canyon but he didn’t get to travel to them. My dad took photos to show us where he went and he brought back books for the family. He also brought me a yo-yo, a lollipop and a couple of t-shirts. I hope I can travel with my dad when I’m older.

I love my dad he’s really cool. What do you love about your dad?

Image created by Spell with flickr

I have this Nintendo DS game called Mario Party. It’s really fun because you play with Mario, his friends and Wario and Waluigi who are usually his enemies in other Mario games. There are 10 rounds on party boards and at the end of each round there is a mini-games. Sometimes battles happen instead of mini-games once every party. A party is the 10 rounds which is the level. In story mode you can play as any available player. You need to play the boards in this order: Wiggler’s Garden, Toadette’s Music Room, DK’s Stone Statue, Kamek’s Library and Bowser’s Pinball Machine and later you have to beat the bosses at the end of each level. There are 6 modes in this game. In party mode you can be any character like story mode except you don’t need to be the same character for every single board, but you can if you want. My favourite characters are Yoshi and Toad.  In order to be able to play Bowser’s Pinball Machine in party mode you first need to beat it on story mode. My favourite mode is the mini-game one. It lets you play mini-games that you’ve unlocked in story mode. My least favourite is puzzle mode because I find it really hard and it can go on forever. When you lose, you lose all your points and you have to start from where you lost at. I find it frustrating because the level I usually get to before I die is really high and difficult so when I restart without any points it makes it even harder. If you want to play in this mode there are 5 puzzles in the first section and one in the second that has two different modes, focus mode or free-for-all. Multiplayer mode lets you play with friends up to 4 people and you can play mini-game or party mode with everyone. There is also a Gallery that lets you see the badges and character figures you automatically get by earning points and boss trophies when you beat the bosses.

I find a lot of the challenges easy in this game, but some are super difficult. I wish there were more medium skilled ones for me to practice on after the easy levels so I’m ready for the hard ones. Right now, it jumps from really easy to really hard too quickly. I still find this game fun because the mini-games are funny. I like running away from the vacuum in Dust Buddies and surfing on soap in Soap Surfers. This is a really good game for friends to challenge each other in the multi-player mode. My friends and I enjoy trying to beat each other in this game. My friend even bought this game because I had it and he thought it was awesome. Maybe you will think so too. Even though there are some things I don’t like about it I still love Mario Party and I think it’s a good game to buy. In fact, you should run to the store right now because they might be running out. It’s that awesome!

I rate it 4/5 Power Stars.

ESRB Rating: E (Everyone)

Last night was an exciting night. At 8:00pm I went to the park with my friends and my sister. My mom and younger brother were supposed to come a little later but something stopped them!

About 9:30 pm my friends and I came home to my place. We went inside my house but we couldn’t find my mom. We looked in the back yard and then my sister yelled “I see her! I see her!”.  She was in the yard across the street with our neighbour and my little brother trying to catch a bunny!

It was a little white bunny and my mom was crouching down chasing him. I was curious about what was going on so I ran over but my mom sent me back home because I could have scared the bunny and there were enough people helping. My mom was trying to help the bunny but it didn’t know that so it kept running away. The bunny belonged to the house across the street and its owners were camping so they didn’t know the bunny had escaped. He dug a hole under the fence and couldn’t find his way back to it.

Finally my mom caught the bunny, but he squirmed which made my mom drop him and then he got really scared. Then, another neighbour came to help. The neighbour brought his son which wasn’t much help because he moved too fast for the bunny which made it super scared and harder to catch. It was frustrating for my mom because she almost had gotten it and she had been trying for over an hour. She tried feeding it clover, lettuce, carrot and celery to get close enough to it so someone could pick it up. A second idea they had was trying to put a cardboard box over top of it to scoop it up. None of these worked because the bunny was too fast and not hungry.

After an hour and a half the bunny must have been worn out because our neighbor was finally able to grab him. He ran to the bunny cage and put it inside and almost dropped it a couple times! Then my mom locked it up and made sure it had food and water and the next day we checked on it to make sure it wasn’t too hot. When the neighbours got back we told them about our bunny adventure and they said thanks for helping the bunny out. They said we were nice people and we can check on the bunny whenever they’re gone. I really like the little bunny and I plan on visiting it soon.

image: My albino rabbit pet by Ritscent released under a CC Attribution – Noncommercial – Share Alike license

The California mantis shrimp is so cool! It eats mussels by using its powerful claws as a hammer which is very smart. It’s 10 inches long and pink like most shrimp but it has blue and red butterfly wings as a tail and below its head. This helps it camouflage and look scary to predators when it stands up. When it stands up it also looks like a praying mantis because of its big eyes and claws.

It’s the most powerful animal for its size in the world! A mantis shrimp’s claws are as fast as a 22 caliber bullet. Isn’t that awesome? If I ever find one I don’t think I’d pick it up just in case it uses its claws on me.

Did you know it isn’t really a shrimp? It got its name because it just looks like a shrimp. The funniest thing about it is it gets stranded during low tide. Its back legs don’t work well on dry land because they’re meant for water. So it curls up and rolls forward like a wheel into the closest tidal pool. That is hilarious!

What is the coolest thing you’ve learned about the mantis shrimp?

image: Mantis Shrimp by prilfish released under a CC Attribution license