Bella Burgeron Loves Origami

My favorite day of the week is Saturday when my sister and I get to visit Grandpa Don. Our mom and dad both work on Saturdays and they feel bad that they aren’t spending “quality time” with us and this is troublesome to them. Mom usually stops at Bovine Bonanza on the way to Grandpa’s to get gas and she’ll buy something to keep us occupied so Grandpa doesn’t have to work as hard at minding us. I think it also holds back Mom and Dad’s guilty feelings about leaving us at Grandpa’s all day. Over the years, we’ve gotten finger paints, puzzles, magazines, a label machine, gardening hand tools, and anything that’s close to the front of the store; lots of sale items over the years. We really have fun at Grandpa’s trailer home but I don’t let on because I’d like us to continue to get interesting things.

Anyway, my name is Bonnie Burgeron and my sister is Bella. We just got our first computer this week from our Nana and our parents have been so busy, with each of them working two jobs, that they let me unpack it and set it up. We have some computers at school but we mostly play games on them and test on them. One of our teachers at school, Coach Nakamura, writes a journal on his computer about keeping healthy habits with exercise and healthy eating. He also gives instructions for making a new origami project every week and he shares that with us during third period gym. I share these with Bella and show her how to make them. She loves folding paper; anything, napkins, receipts, pages ripped out of the phone book and she has all of those origami animals in different sizes all on her dresser. Coach Nakamura prints it right off of the internet from his website so you can see it is from his own journal online. His website is called nakamurastrong.wordpress.com and it has an archive (which means a history) of all of his posts (which means when he writes something on his website) so you can go all the way back to his first origami project and not just the new one from last week which was a seal.

When I told Bella that Mom and Dad were going to start writing an online journal like Coach Nakamura she got to be very excited even though I told her that they wouldn’t be writing about origami. She decided that day to start a diary of her own. Since I put that idea in her mind I feel responsible for putting her writings online so that’s what I’m going to do. I really didn’t plan on writing online journal posts but on reconsideration, I wonder if Mom and Dad will even have the time, so I feel a bit obligated to write for them. This is my first writing for them and for Nana. I’m the oldest child in our house (I turned 14 yesterday on May 24th), so I pitch in quite a bit making meals, taking care of my sister, etc. I sometimes walk with my sister to Bovine Bonanza after school to do the grocery shopping for the house. I also take care of the yard — the front yard and the backyard. But my best days are Saturdays. Grandpa Don takes care of everything.

Origami seal that Bella made yesterday. She’s real good at this sort of thing.