Word of the week: Wom-Bat!

15 Jul 2011 Leave a comment

by Little Sumo Girl in Bugs and creatures, Cool Stuff, Travel Tags:

Yep, still in Perth Australia…and still trying to stay warm – despite having had a couple of warmer days…

My new best buddy, who keeps me company, plays hide and seek with me, and keeps me warm is….”P’tit Wombat” (ie. Lil’ Wombat). He’s not a ‘real’ creature, but I look forward to playing with P’tit Wombat everytime I wake up from my naps 🙂

Although, I did get a chance to see some Kangaroos and Koalas at the Yanchep National Park the other day, I have not had the chance to see a real wombat yet…Here’s what it looks like – cute, eh?

 

New toys – woo hoo!

15 Jul 2011 Leave a comment

by Little Sumo Girl in Bali, Cool Stuff

Lately, I’ve been getting a little bored with my old ‘baby toys’ so mom and dad have splurged to get me some new toys to help me develop my motor skills…A move they may regret soon enough?

Bowling pins – what were they thinking?

Mom wasn’t even able to hit the pins until her fifth try – I can’t really blame her since the ball was not exactly round (Made in Bali, that’s all I can say…)

Although, I haven’t quite perfected my bowling technique, I do enjoy throwing the ball and running after it. Actually, I prefer just throwing it and having someone else go fetch it. As for the pins, I like to knock them down with my hands, like a kung fu/karate move…Or better yet, I like trying to walk on them – not one of mom’s favourite moves

I think I’ll ask my great grandma and great grandpa for some bowling lessons since they’ve been playing in their leagues for a long time – nothing like some tips from a pro to get you started on the right foot 🙂

Rolling Elephant on wheels

 

This looks quite silly but is actually quite fun, especially when you get your parents to push it around for you. All I have to do is run around, pretending to be attacked by the Flying Elephant. Meanwhile, I can keep laughing at mom or dad who is actually chasing me around pushing a plastic Elephant and getting exhausted in a matter of a few minutes – Old folks, are so outta shape!  Oh, another nice feature – it makes this really annoying clicking sound as it is rolling – gotta love that!

Then I got my DSP 220 Truck

DSP stands for Dump – Super Power…I assume they are referring to the ‘dump’ truck, but for a second I thought they were referring to my ‘digestive track’ capacities, which can also be safely tagged as Dump – Super Power as well…Hmmmm…Subliminal message there?

What I love about this truck is that, with the string that was attached in front, I get to pull it around. But most of all, I can put my entire posse it in the back, so they look like a bunch of Balinese construction workers loaded into a pickup going off to the construction site. This is truly representative of how the real life construction workers get to work…

Check out how cozy my posse is in the back of the truck!

 

ooohhh, I feel I’ll have numerous hours of fun with these new toys…should keep me busy for another two weeks or so….

Vocal chords

24 Jun 2011 Leave a comment

by Little Sumo Girl in Cool Stuff

So I’ve been testing my voice lately, and I think I’ve reached new ‘peaks’. In terms of volume, I’ve always been quite powerful, but in terms of frequency – wow, I’m quite impressed by how far my vocal chords can go…

I can’t control my high-pitched range like Mariah Carey, but I do have quite the Passion à la Céline Dion. I think if I continue practicing, I can even consider offering my services to those disk companies who make audio test CDs for HI-FI sound systems. If I learn to control my vocal chords, I could record the different test tracks at different frequencies. Perhaps my voice can even go beyond 20kHz!! If this is the case, I’m lucky cuz that means I won’t be bothering older folks, since they definitely can not hear tones at that frequency range!

Needless to say, mom & dad would rather I didn’t keep practicing my ‘singing/screaming’…

Happy Father’s Day

18 Jun 2011 Leave a comment

by Little Sumo Girl in Bali, Cool Stuff

To all the dad’s out there! Hope you have a great day! I know I’m having a blast with my dad in Bali. I hope to be just like him when I grow up….

Book of the Month: Le Grand Livre des Mots

15 Jun 2011 Leave a comment

by Little Sumo Girl in Cool Stuff

June 2011: Book of the month – My favourite author so far is definitely Richard Scarry…Well, my collection isn’t that big to begin with, but you gotta start somewhere…We got the latest edition of ‘Le Grand Livre des Mots’ before coming to Bali. My parents were so excited to have found it, cuz they stopped publishing it a few years ago and this new edition even has French and English in the same book, so I can learn both languages…Yeah!

Both my parents grew up with this book, dad in French and mom in English…So now the traditions lives on…I didn’t really care for this book a few months ago, but I’d say in the last month or so, I’ve really started to see how cool it is. My favourite pages are definitely the grocery shopping page and the dinner-time page 🙂 How can you not like pages filled with beautiful illustrations of food…Yummy! If only you could have the smells too 🙂

There are also plenty of animals in it, which allow me to practice the different animal calls! I can do the cow, the chicken, the dog, the fish, the elephant,  the horse trotting, the crab/lobster snapping his claws, and I’m now learning to do the seal. Don’t ask me how, but dad is teaching me…The book can also be used as a great workout equipment. I lift it and drag it all around, helping me build stronger arms… Unfortunately, it’s not doing much for bulging belly…

Reading this book also serves as my cool down routine every night when I have my French lesson with dad…

If you don’t already have this book, I highly recommend it…You’ll have a blast! Oh yeah, one other fun thing to do is to tear up the pages…Mom & dad don’t really like that game though…

Le Grand Livre des Mots by Richard Scarry

Super Power #3: Bulldozer

18 May 2011 Leave a comment

by Little Sumo Girl in Cool Stuff, Super Power

Watch out! Here I come…I can now walk, and nothing’s going to stop me! I’ll walk over those toys lying around (oops, those are mine!), I’ll walk over your arms and legs when you’re sitting on the ground, I’ll walk over that super-sized cushion too…

Big or Small, Hard or Soft, I’m not afraid…I can walk over you, and without any shoes on too!

You can call me the Little Sumo Bulldozer!

New drinking apparatus

16 Apr 2011 Leave a comment

by Little Sumo Girl in Cool Stuff, Restos & Food, Super Power

Just when I thought I’d mastered the basic functions such as ‘drinking’, I discover there are new ways of making this daily activity even more fun and interesting!

I’ve never been a pro at ‘drinking’ – it sounds silly but this is not something that comes naturally you know! It takes practice and training, and learning the appropriate technique also helps. Since birth, I’ve been spending alot of time and effort trying to become more efficient at drinking ‘from mom’, the bottle, the non-spill baby cups – with and without handles, and then there was the basic cup. The latter still gives me some grief… Mom & dad still won’t let me hold my cup on my own, as a change of clothes would be required each time. Personally, I wouldn’t mind cuz I could then change my look more often, but this would require more investment in my limited wardrobe…anyhow, that’s an issue I need to discuss with my parents…

Recently, I was introduced to a new drinking apparatus. We were at the resto, and mom started putting this plastic tube in my mouth. I had no clue what to do with this, so I started chewing on it, like I do most things that go into my mouth…Kinda boring and uneventful. Then, my parents showed me that I needed to suck air from this tube and within a few seconds I had a surprising rush of flavours in my mouth… Sweet banana-strawberry-mango lassie – yummy for the tummy! I liked it so much that I finished off half of mom’s drink in only a few minutes.

New drinking apparatus!

Drinking from a ‘straw’ has been the easiest drinking technique to learn, thus far! No special technique is really required, and it is much cleaner than the other methods, most of the time! And in general, when a drink is presented with a straw, it’s usually some kind of ‘cocktail’ that beats drinking plain ol’ milk or water 🙂 Bring it on…Cheers!

Gardening tools

10 Apr 2011 Leave a comment

by Little Sumo Girl in Bali, Bugs and creatures, Cool Stuff

When we moved into our new place in Canggu, mom and dad hired a gardener to do a major clean-up of the lawn. The land is beautiful with different types of trees, flowers, a temple and even a ‘river’ in the back. However, it was starting to look a bit like a jungle-in-the-happening, and what’s scary in the jungle is what’s hidden underneath all that ‘Natural’ beauty 🙂 We needed someone to come freshen up the place and set free the many creatures that most definitely were lurking around…and fast…

Our gardener did an amazing job in only two days, it went from a ‘wild-jungle-adventure’ feel to a ‘serene-bed&breakfast-like’ ambiance! What makes it even more impressive is the tools, that he used to transform our landscape!

I’m sure you won’t find this lawnmower on sale this spring at Home Depot or Sears…

Old-school lawnmower

Oh, and he only had to kill one scary snake during the ‘clean-up’. Unfortunately, it was The undesirable ‘Green Pit Viper’, with a red tail…

Green Pit Viper Snake

House Cleaning Ants

10 Apr 2011 Leave a comment

by Little Sumo Girl in Bali, Bugs and creatures, Cool Stuff

There are many creatures here in Bali, from dragon flies, bees, geckos to bats and snakes. Ants may seem like the most harmless little buggers, but when they’re packed together, boy it’s extraordinary what they can do!

Trust me, in the few months since I’ve been here, I’ve seen my fair share of ants: migrating from one home to another, clearing out the last crumbs of a bag of peanuts, feasting in our garbage cans,… Although they can be a nuisance sometimes, it can be handy to have them around, especially for keeping the house ‘clean’ or for ‘Dead-Pest Control’ rather.

They pretty much force you to keep the place ‘clean’ or at a minimum, to clear out anything that’s edible from any open surface area. But, I learned that they can also help ‘clean up’ your home…of dead bugs.

We had a dead gecko in our living room the other day, and before we could get our broom to sweep him out. The ants had already carried him out, in just a matter of minutes. Unfortunately, the video came out too blurry but here’s a pic. You can imagine them moving the poor gecko at about 1cm/sec…pretty fast!

A few days later, they were trying to move a dead cockroach from our bathroom but mom was too impatient to wait for them…With all this ‘food’ they’re getting, let’s just hope that I don’t come face to face with an army of Giant Ants soon!

 

Toast for breakfast?

23 Mar 2011 1 Comment

by Little Sumo Girl in Bali, Cool Stuff Tags:

On most days, my parents and I have toasts for breakfasts…If you read my other post, you know that they get the good stuff (Skippy or Nutella) while I get to have ‘dry toast’ or “Vache qui rit…” cheese, which is actually really yummy – so I’ll stop complaining now!

But since arriving here in Bali, we noticed that the toaster takes an extremely long time to ‘toast’ the bread…When I say a ‘long time’, I mean almost an ‘eternity’… Five minutes in the toaster, and the bread still does not come out brown/golden even when set to maximum…We thought it may have something to do with the electricity, or perhaps the toaster was simply broken…

Well, we may have figured out the problem this morning! Mom had placed a few smaller pieces of bread into the toaster and one piece was just too small and got stuck. Poking through with a knife (Note that you must always unplug the toaster when doing this, as mom & dad have gotten a few shocks here in Bali) and turning the toaster upside down did not manage to get the piece of toast out. So the last option was to open the toaster from the bottom (like when you want to clean out all the accumulated bread crumbs from the toaster)

Well, guess what we found? It’s quite sad, but to our surpirse, we found a poor gecko that got ‘fried’ in the depths of our toaster. Who knows exactly what he was doing there? Maybe he was there to get slight tan, like people who go to tanning salons. And as he was relaxing with his eyes closed in the initial warmth of the toaster, he may not have realized that it was getting hotter and hotter in there and that the tip of his nose was starting to burn. By the time he realized what was occurring in his ‘spa’, it was probably already too late for him to make a speedy evacuation from the toaster. The poor thing! All people who go to tanning salons should take heed – these rooms heat up pretty fast, and by the time you feel the heat/burn, it may already be too late – Result: Orange skin (not so bad compared to our ‘toasted friend’ here, but is it really the look you’re going for?)

In the end, we finally got our little piece of toast out…Who knows, perhaps the toaster will start working properly tomorrow now that it’s been ‘cleaned out’!

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