The Exodus flight is booked!

Last night we booked our one-way flight from Manchester to Calgary - the date will be Wednesday August 7th 2013.

This is earlier than we originally planned. We had the nice idea of cruising over to New York on the QM2 in the spring of 2014, then having a long roadtrip to Calgary from there. This would have meant the dogs didn't have to fly, they could cruise in style with us. But it just proved too expensive, and time consuming. Once we came back from our holiday at New Year, we asked ourselves why were we waiting so long to make the move, and we looked at flying over later this Summer. We asked our bosses if this was possible, they went into Conclave to discuss it (in case anyone's reading this in years to come, the Catholic Cardinals are choosing a new Pope at the moment) and came out with white smoke billowing, saying it was OK.

Of course it's not just as simple as booking a flight. We've had to secure some temporary accommodation for when we arrive (one month rental of a 2-bedroom basement apartment in Cochrane, just outside Calgary. That's Cochrane in the photo, above), find somewhere for the dogs to live during that time, as the owner of the apartment already has 3 dogs (our boys will go into Kennels just outside Cochrane for a month), and arrange to fly them over on the same flight as us (Jackson as excess baggage, Mishka as cargo!).
Once there we need to find a longer-term, dog-friendly rental place, buy a car, get Lara enrolled in school and find a nursery for Danny. It's just as well my Mum will be coming with us for that first month to lend a hand with looking after Lara and Danny while Olga and I sort out the boring stuff.

More good news on the Grandma front - Baba Luda will be back in Bury at the start of April, just in time to help us start packing. We've had quotes from three shipping companies to move our belongings, I've yet to pick one, but the jist is a 40-foot container will be outside our house around the 1st of August and a handful of burly men will pack anything not nailed down.

A Catch up on Danil

I'll get a post in about Danil now, before his big day tomorrow.

He's progressing really well. We weighed him this morning (I made him sit on some very cold bathroom scales), and he's 10.2kg. He just looks in good shape, with chubby cheeks and a fat tum, and strong-looking arms and legs.
He's poorly with a cold at the moment, there's nothing wrong with whatever bit of him that produces snot. He had been having temperature fluctuations recently, and he's been on antibiotics for a week or so now, and they seem to have sorted out what was really bothering him, without touching his cold (we all know, antibiotics WON'T help a cold!!!).
During January and February his sleep patterns went a bit funny. He was consistent in his sleep, he would just insist on waking between 4.30am and 4.45am, day after day. Olga would feed him, he'd be nice and awake, and we would have to take it in turns to take him down to the lounge and look after him there. He would go back to sleep after an hour or so of playing, so Olga and I got into a routine whereby the one of us downstairs with him would have a nap on the sofa under a spare duvet once Danny had fallen back asleep in his pram. This went on for nearly 6 weeks and we just accepted that this was how it was going to be, we had an early-waker. However, in the last 3 or 4 weeks he has been sleeping in later and later, and rather than take him downstairs after his early morning feed, we tried putting him straight back in his cot, and after a few minutes of ssshhing, he would go back to sleep. This seems to have worked, and along with the antibiotics sorting out his body temperature issues, he is sleeping through now to sensible times, in fact it was 7.04am today before he demanded any morning attention at all. Hurrah!

He now has 6 teeth, 2 upper and 2 lower front teeth are well established, and 2 upper incisors are appearing. Those front teeth most likely contributed to his funny sleeping habits earlier in the year, although I'm not sure how they could account for how unerring he was at knowing when it was between 4.30 and 4.45am!

He's superfast at crawling now too. And he loves to pull himself up into a standing position. We think he'll bypass the knee-walking stage that Lara went through for a quite some weeks or months, and soon enough he'll just start walking.

His current favourite (non-milk) food is grapes. He can't get enough, so long as we quarter them first. He also like bananas and brown bread. He eats well at nursery, and from tomorrow he should start cows' milk too.

He certainly seems to be a happy baby, although he can make his displeasure known quite loudly if he has to. All the staff at nursery know him, even the girls who work in other rooms, he's quite the flirt, apparently, always ready with a cheeky smile.

Danil: A crawling, eating machine

A red letter day yesterday - both kids cleared their respective plates! Olga prepared roast chicken, potatoes, carrots and vegetables, and whilst we knew it's one of Lara's favourites, Danny surprised us by eating all that he was given, too. OK, so his high-chair table looks like a Jackson Pollock, but honestly, he did eat a lot!
He's also crawling now, and has been for 3 weeks or so (how did I not blog that?) He's very speedy, and is confident enough to pull himself up to a standing position. Nothing is safe..

Sledging or Swimming?

We've had some snow here on two occasions over the past two or three weeks, but somehow we never managed to go out sledging. Last weekend the snow started falling on Friday afternoon, and by Saturday morning there was a good covering of 4 inches or so. Lara's ice skating lessons were postponed - nothing to do with the snow, they'd had a break-in at the rink - so I was fully expecting to have to deploy the sledge, and started researching on the web the best local hills.  However, Lara decided she would prefer to go swimming, and neither Olga nor I had taken her swimming since we'd come back from holiday, so we headed to the local pool. Lara did want to walk into Bury through the snow, which took half an hour, and the snow was already turning to slush along the roads and footpaths, the temperature was at least 5 degrees C, and it seemed that sledging that afternoon might be a wet affair.

The swimming pool was almost empty, given it was a Saturday morning, probably most of the kids had chosen sledging over swimming. It was the same pool where I'd learnt to swim 30 years ago, which was a sobering thought, as it was the first thing I could easily identify as being achieved that long ago. I'm not sure very much had changed at the pool since then! The water was warm though, and Lara has expressed an interest in swimming lessons, which is something we've had on her list for a while now, and really should try to squeeze into her packed weekly schedule.

By the time we had a McDonalds  dinner, and done some shopping to replenish her school uniform supply, it was mid-afternoon when we got home, and the topic of sledging never really came up. I took Danny and the dogs for a nice long walk in what was left of the snow and Lara just chilled out for the afternoon. 

Grandma came over for a sleepover that evening so Olga and I could go out for some liquid refreshment, and by the morning almost all of the snow had melted. 

Lara of course had the chance to play in some snow the next morning, as she had skiing lesson #2 of her Level 5 course. She's a skier of extremes at the moment, she either comes down very slowly, but correctly, or switches her skis from "pizza" to "chips" and comes straight down very quickly, although she is able to stop (she just neglects to steer).  The instructor was happy with her and the rest of the group of 6, and it should be more of the same tomorrow morning.

A very good day for Lara

Lara's had a very good Sunday; this morning she resumed her skiing lessons after our holiday, it was leeson one of Level 5, and this one would be longer than all her previous lessons - one hour 50 minutes instead of 50 minutes. She had been introduced to the main slope at Chill Factore in her Level 4 lessons, but sometime during Level 5 she would be taken to the very top of the slope.  As it turned out, the instructor had a look at the six kids on the lesson making a few runs from the first "stop" on the main slope, and was obviously happy with what she saw, and before half an hour was up, they were all heading up to the very top!
Here's their little group following the instructor like ducklings, Lara's bringing up the rear, wearing the all-white suit:

She fell a couple of times, but some of those were down to trying to avoid one of the kids in front who had fallen, and there is no shame in falling on your first runs down that slope - it's steeper than it looks in the photo!

Then tonight, as usual for a Sunday night, it was time to practise her reading before school tomorrow, and she read the two books she'd been given, one of them with no help at all from me, other than confirmation that she had got certain words right, and she read almost every word in her second book, only stumbling over difficult words ending in "y", as spelling those out phonetically doesn't help so much, but it was certainly her best attempt so far at reading.
To cap it all off, after we'd finished the second book, she asked "Can I go to sleep now?"

Days don't get much better than that... :-)