Friday 12 October 2012

The girls' skiing lessons

Lara had her first proper skiing lesson last Saturday morning, she says she enjoyed it, and wants to do it again, which is about as much as we can ask for. She's starting at Level 1, she has three lessons at this level, then moves onto Level 2, and so on. I've booked her place on the Level 2 course today, so I hope she continues to enjoy it!
Olga is making great progress with her lessons, in fact she'll be having her final lesson - Level 9 - this coming Sunday. Here she is making the most of a quiet piste on a midweek evening when she was between levels 6 and 7:

And on that note, it's gone midnight now and my alarm is going off at 7am (on a Saturday morning) so we can get our snow angel to her next lesson. It'll all be worth it........

Danil-tishooooo! Bless you

Olga picked up a nasty cold last weekend, either when we went out for her birthday meal in Manchester with Lucy and Sergei, orwhen we went down to High Wycombe so Lara could go to her best friend Zoe's 5th birthday party, and we could catch up with Zoe's parents, and clear out the last of our stuff from storage. It was great to see Lara and Zoe play together, and they were inseparable all afternoon, but they managed to say goodbye to each other without any tears or tantrums. Hopefully it'll not be too long before they see each other again.
It was only a matter of time before Danny caught it too, but getting to 7 months without a cold is pretty good, but it is also a reflection on how we don't socialise with Danny as much as we did with Lara. She was forever being taken to the pub, but we don't do that with Danny, and Luda is doing such a great job of looking after him during the day that we don't want to change much, but she stays at home with him most of the time. He starts nursery 4 days a week in a month's time, so between now and then we'll get my mum more involved in looking after him, to get him used to her - she'll be looking after him on Mondays once Luda goes home in November - but also so he goes to busy places and gets used to strangers being around, complete with their germs.
His transition onto more solid food is going well, he's eating every two hours, and Luda has a good system going, with Olga just topping him up when he needs it. He's had a couple of disturbed nights this week due to his cold, but nothing too outrageous.
He's still extremely smiley, he sits up perfectly well now, he's starting to roll over on his own, and there's the faintest sign that he wants to crawl.




Bear Grylls? Eat your heart out

Olga got me a great birthday present: a weekend bushcraft course in Oxfordshire! Building my own shelter, sleeping in the forest, preparing my own food, which meant turning a wood pigeon inside out on my first night, before gutting and filleting a trout for lunch on Saturday, and skinning and chopping up a rabbit for dinner. There were classes on foraging for food, firelighting, knife safety, shelter building, trapping and water purification.
There were 15 blokes and 1 one woman on this course, and we were blessed with perfect late summer weathe, and I even survived a Friday AND Saturday night without a beer...

 Where I slept on the first night - we built our shelters on Saturday morning

 My shelter takes shape

 Cooking our gutted and filleted trout. I even practised my skills on trout from the fish market when I got home!


 Lead instructor Martyn shows us how to deal with a rabbit. I brought the feet from my rabbit home as good luck charms for Olga

The instructors and some of the customers on the Sunday morning

The idea behind it was that when we move to Canada, I would like us to be able to go out and do the whole "wilderness camping" thing, and this showed me that I could gut a fish, skin a rabbit and get the meat from a wood pigeon, amongst all the other great things we learnt. I might never need to do it again, but if I'm ever in a situation where I need to, now I know I can.

Plenty to catch up on...

Well, another 3 weeks or more slip by without a post, so there's a lot to catch up on. We're just finding that weeks are sliding past without us really noticing - before we know it, it's Friday again. Sometimes that's a good thing, but not when you'd like to blog about what you've been up to that week.
So it's easier to search years from now, I'll do a few shorter posts rather than one long one. We are finding this very useful for checking up on when Lara reached milestones as she grew up, so we can compare to Danny. Apparently she got her first teeth showing through at 8 months; Danny is 7 months tomorrow and no sign yet. Any excuse to put a photo of him up! We staged this one to compare with one I took of Lara when she was about the same age:
 (sorry that Danny one is all wierd looking, my phone wouldn't take a normal photo!)