Thursday 17 September 2015

Uh oh, another trip to Airdrie Urgent Care

When I picked up Lara from school on Tuesday to take her to skating, she told me that her foot hurt a bit after she rolled her ankle during recess. She had a slight limp, but we've all rolled our ankle at some time, and I thought it was just a sprain. We went to skating, thinking that once her foot was laced into her Skate she'd be OK. She did a couple of circuits of the rink and told me she was OK, so we left it at that. After an hour of skating, she had an hour of off-ice exercise with her skating buddies, and got through that without complaining either. She came home and asked me to strap her foot up in a bandage, I thought it was more for the attention than anything else, and her foot didn't look too bad. But an hour later, when we took the bandage off when she was getting ready for bed, her ankle had really swollen, and now she was in some discomfort. So we took the decision that Olga should take her to urgent care in Airdrie, the same place we took Dan when he fractured his collarbone. They were gone for a couple of hours, before they came back with Lara in a blue cast and a pair of crutches, the diagnosis being a fracture of her foot, close to her ankle. She needs to on crutches for 4 weeks, so that puts skating, taekwon-do and dryland ski training on hold. We put her mattress on the floor in her room so she doesn't have to negotiate steps if she needs the toilet, and she's got the technique sorted for getting up and onto her crutches. She went to school today, though we took her in the truck rather than her going on her bus. Her teacher will organise "recess buddies" to help her at break time, and an elevator buddy to go with her in the lift at school so she doesn't need to worry about stairs. Let's see how long the love of crutches lasts, the novelty might wear off soon. She is looking forward to choosing the colour of her next cast though, as you can choose these days. My money is on pink...

Dan wanted a cast too, but he had to put up with a sock.,.


Sunday 13 September 2015

Dryland Ski Training & a Canyon walk



The weather on Saturday was great, sunny and high 20s, so we took the opportunity to have a trip out, in case this is the last warm Saturday of the year.
Lara had to attend the first session of her "dryland training" for her ski club at a park in Calgary in the morning, which was 90 minutes of various exercises designed to build up her strength and stamina, as well as helping to create bonds and friendships with the other "athletes" as the club refers to the children.
From there we headed out towards Banff, to a place called Johnston Canyon, between Banff and Lake Louise. I'd read in our "Walks in the Rockies with Children" book that this was a very popular place, and indeed it was. The car park was full, and there were dozens of cars parked along the roadside, but with a little bit of fortuitous timing, we ended up with a space very close to the start of the walk and the gift shop/cafe. The path goes alongside a stream, heading up through Johnston Canyon, where in places the path is a walkway attached directly to the canyon walls, and on a busy Saturday afternoon, there were times when the foot traffic came to a halt at narrow bits. If you walk the full route, you pass seven waterfalls, and it's a 5km round trip, but we just did the first half, as far as the first set of large falls, where we stopped to play by the stream, then we headed back for ice creams. It was a 2.5km round trip, but the kids didn't complain once, mainly because when the path wasn't a narrow walkway screwed to a vertical cliff, it ran through a lovely forest with lots of side trails to explore and trees to clamber over, under or around. It would be an amazing place to explore if there weren't 10,000 other people around, and it's open (almost) all year round, apart from a month from September 15th when they perform any maintenance on the path. So we'll head there in the dead of winter, when the falls will be frozen, and you can snowshoe along the path, with - hopefully - no-one else around.