Life - the long game

So amongst the house moving events, which are moving along - more on that in another post - last Wednesday I received an email which changed the way our lives will be from now on...

It was an email from the Canadian High Commission in London, asking me to send in our passports to have Permanent Residency visas issued.  Olga and I chose to keep this application a secret from everyone but close family until we knew for certain that we would be successful. Given that we sent the initial forms off at the start of January 2010, it's been two and a half years of trying to not talk about it with friends, which hasn't been easy at all.

I've been looking back at old emails, and found that the earliest one I have relating to my thoughts of moving to Canada go back as far as November 2008, when I registered with a website promoting businesses for sale - my plan had been for us to buy a turnkey business over there. This email related to buying a convenience store in a suburb of Vancouver!  It was nearly a year before I actually discussed it with Olga, it was just something I looked into in my spare time and daydreamed about. Once I had discussed it with Olga though, it was immediately obvious that she was in favour of the move, and had considered Canada as a possible destination when she decided to leave Russia (I'm lucky she chose England!).  So we started to investigate more seriously how we might move there, and it turned out that at that time, around the end of 2009, that my occupation of IT Manager - the role I was effectivley doing, and had been for two years or more - was on the list of 38 "in-demand" occupations in Canada, and that meant that I was entitled to apply under their Federal Skilled Worker programme. It required me to have at least one year of experience in one of the 38 in-demand occupations (check!), be fluent in English or French (check, just), not have any recent criminal convictions (check), and a few other considerations, each of which was given a points score, such as my level of education, my age, Olga's education and whether we'd have enough cash in the bank to support us for six months if we moved over there. So long as I achieved a score of 67 out of 100, I could apply. I scored 71 I think, so we decided to take the plunge, and over the Christmas holidays in 2009 we put our initial application together and sent it off to a government department in Nova Scotia on the 4th January 2010.

This initial application was checked, and once they agreed that I appeared to be a suitable candidate for Permanent Residency under the Federal Skilled Worker programme, they sent my application to London, who then contacted me in March 2010 asking me to prove my background, which meant getting hold of work contracts proving I was an IT Manager, and that I did the jobs they expected an IT Manager to do; I couldn't really supply any references, as I had been working for the same company for 10 years and I didn't want to tell them we were thinking of leaving (Olga and I worked for the same company then, too!). We had to get two estate agent valuations of the house, to show that we had equity in it, so if we did move, we'd have enough money to live on initially (now you know why we've sold the house!);  I needed transcripts of the university degrees I'd done, in sealed envelopes; Olga needed certified translations of her work experience and education achievements..; we both needed UK Police Certificates to show we had no criminal records, and Olga had to get one from Russia;  I even had to write a letter to show that I was fluent in English! We had a maximum of 120 days to get all this information together and sent back, we sent the full pack to London on 17th May, after 75 days.
Then the waiting really started!
They acknowledged receipt of our documents on 8th July 2010, then we had no further news until after I'd sent them a "do you remember me?" email in February 2011 - to be fair, they had said in July 2010 to not bother them for 8 months, so I waited nearly 8 months. They acknowledged me, and that was it. Nothing more for the rest of 2011! Luckily we were busy getting on with our new jobs with Flare, and happy to let this bubble away in the background.
So, after virtually nothing from them for nearly 18 months, on 24th January 2012 our status changed from "Documents received" to "In Process", which meant a human being was finally looking at all those documents we had sent in. Things really motored from then on. On 4th February we were asked to send in updated information about our application, which basically meant we waited until Olga had Danil, then we got his UK passport and sent in information about him, and about Dad passing away (they want to know everything!) and fresh UK police certificates - we sent all this in April 2012.
A month later, in mid-May 2012 we were asked to have medical examinations and send in yet more money for to cover processing fees. All this was good news, as you don't get this far unless you have passed all their background and work experience checks, so we were delighted, and I managed to get us an appointment to have a medical examination at a hospital in Manchester when we were up visiting Mum at the end of May. Even Danil and Lara were examined, albeit briefly. We were very pleased to find out that Lara could read letters on the eye test chart, proving not only was her eyesight OK, but that she could identify certain letters when a strange man asked her to!
So the medical examiner sent those results in the Canadian High Commission, and we just waited a bit more. Until Wednesday 18th July 2012 (which would have been my grandad's 100th birthday) when I received an email asking me to provide my and my family's passports "for visa issuance"!
And here we are....
On Tuesday this week we received Lara's freshly renewed UK passport in the post, which was excellent timing, as it meant Olga and I could take out passports in person to the High Commission today to deliver them in person. We'll go back in two week's time to collect them; this happens to be the day when we are going to London anyway to watch the Women's basketball semi-finals at the O2, so the timing was perfect.
Here is Olga and Danil in the queue at the HC on Grosvenor Street in London, we only had to wait 15 minutes, and the passports were dropped off in 5 minutes, and I have a receipt (somewhere!) that I have to show when we go to pick them up:

The way things work now is... once I've collected our passports, with a PR visa in each one, we need to visit Canada before one year elapses from the date of our medicals (30th May), to "activate" them. We don't need to move over then though, we can go on holiday to activate them, which is what we're planning to do, either in Lara's October half term or maybe around New Year.
Once activated, we need to spend 2 years out of 5 in Canada to retain our PR, which effectively means we have 3 years from the date of activation to move over permanently. We're planning to move over in Spring 2014, the reasons for which I'll explain in another post - this one is getting too long!
So for now, we're really looking forward to spending 18 months to 2 years living in Bury, planning the big move, which will be to somewhere in the vicinity of Calgary.

I know this post hasn't even touched on the more emotional aspects of why we're going to a country that Olga and I - even as seasoned travellers - have never visited, and why we're moving the children away from friends and family, but hopefully we'll get chance to explain in person that to those of you who read this; otherwise I'll just post it up on here sometime if I ever get a week or two to explain it!!

Phew, time for a beer now!

Finally - news on the house!

Well, here we are. After accepting an offer at the end of April on this house, from a couple with no chain, and with us moving into rented accomodation and thus with no chain either, after more than 2 months we're finally about to exchange contracts. The deposit cheque has been banked by our buyer's solicitor, and once it has cleared the banking system, contracts will be exchanged. Hoorah!

The timing is excellent, as after 6 weeks of scrutinizing Rightmove on a daily basis for a rental property that suits our needs, and with that search ranging from the tip of Cornwall to Southern Scotland, we have found our next home.

It's a converted pub, in Bury - my home town! I drank in there on at least one occasion, albeit more than 15 years ago. I think I did the pub quiz there...

It has space - 5 bedrooms and 3 reception rooms, as well as a lovely big kitchen. Being an ex-pub, it also has cellars! Those aren't really habitable unfortunately, but they'll be great for storage, and I really should put some kind of home-brew kit in there, it would be rude not to!

It's only half a mile to Bury's largest park, a mile to Bury town centre and 4 miles to Grandma's house. And when I rang the school admissions department on Monday, we secured the last place available at the local school for Lara.
It's been awkward with her and school until now, as she has known which primary school she had a place for in Wycombe, and recognised it whenever we drove past it, and questions like "When will I be going to that school?" had to be answered in a rather faffy manner. We had to take her to a half hour induction there last week, in case the sale of the house fell through and she would need to start school there. Other parents were buying uniforms for their children, and again it was difficult for us to explain to Lara why we couldn't buy her uniform yet. At that point we hadn't seen the house in Bury, so we couldn't give her any positive news about where she would be going to school.

As it turned out, all the research on Rightmove proved fruitless; there were houses we liked that got taken by other people because we weren't in a position to apply for them, and the endless waiting for the buyer's solicitors to do what they needed to do was getting us very frustrated. In the end it was a little like Lara's birth - lots of waiting for something you know is going to happen, then everything happens very quickly and sooner than you expected!  Occasionally I'd look on findaproperty.com for a change, and a week or so ago I saw this house on there, and saved it as a possibility. I came back to it on Friday morning, and decided I needed to find out some more information about it, as the particulars on the website were quite basic. I rang the lettings agent, he answered some questions over the phone, and said he'd send me more information by email. This arrived at 5.15 on Friday afternoon, and it was very good news - internally the house gave us the space we needed, and the landlord didn't mind us having dogs. I went to pick Lara up from nursery, and by the time I got back 30 minutes later, I had received an email from our solicitors - yes, at 5.45 on a Friday afternoon - saying that there would be no more enquiries from our buyers, and that they would be in a position to exchange contracts next week. So finally we had the green light to seriously consider putting an application in on a house, if we found one we liked. I rang the lettings agent again on Saturday morning, and we arranged a viewing on the house for Sunday afternoon. That was perfect for us, so we had a day trip up to Grandma's on Sunday, and went to see the house.  It has tenants in at the moment, and it was quite cluttered, including a full-size motocross dirtbike in the kitchen, but once I had mentally replaced their clutter with ours, and Olga and I had discussed it at length on the 3 hour drive home, we decided it was the right house. The application went in on Monday morning (just in time, the lettings agent had had three calls about the house that morning), we sent the forms and supporting documents back last night, and by at 5pm today I had the call that our references were fine and as far as they were concerned, this was a done deal and the house is ours. Apparently, Joe the Landlord is delighted with us as prospective tenants. I suppose we don't really pose much risk to his property!
So we went from not having a house to move to, to it being "Let agreed" in 5 days.

The plan is to complete the sale of this place on Friday 10th August, that'll be confirmed once the contracts are exchanged, hopefully on Friday, which will be a lovely birthday present for me.

So the clock is ticking now on clearing everything out of this house. We've already filled one and a quarter storage units in Storage King, and the house still looks full. I think we'll use all that space in the cellar...

Danny - he's a big lad

After nearly a month, I'm finally getting around to updating this blog. We've been on holiday, and preoccupied with getting ready for the house sale. More on those in other posts...

Danil is doing really well. His sleeping is excellent, all through the night from 7pm until 5.30-6am usually. Olga gives him a quick breakfast and he's back to sleep for another hour, giving Olga some more rest. It seems to be working a treat, as he was weighed properly today for the first time in 8 weeks - which in itself shows how confident we are that he's been putting on weight adequately - and he's 7.6kg (16lbs 12oz). For his age (17 weeks) this puts him just over the 75th percentile. He's tall too, or long I suppose I should say, and seems to be fitting into 6-12 months clothes quite comfortably.

He's reacting in the right way to us when he sees us, with laughs and smiles, and is very alert. His current obsession is with pint glasses, he just stares and stares if he sees one. A chip off the old block.

Lara's continuing to be great with him, of course at the moment he's all cute and fun, and isn't a threat to her toys or her attention from us. She plays peekaboo with him, and he always smiles when he sees her, which seems to make her very proud.

Baba Luda is looking after him during the day now that Olga has returned to work full time, though of course one of the benefits of working from home is we can play with Danny for a few minutes any time we like, or if he needs us, and Olga is on hand to feed him when he's hungry. The "system" is working really well.

House update, and other grown up stuff

We're still waiting to exchange contracts on the sale of this house; it's been 6 weeks since we agreed a price, and I chased our conveyancer today, so we can find out where we are in the process before we go on holiday next Monday. I sent back our seller's questionnaires 4 weeks ago, and returned our signed copies of the contract last week. As soon as we get word that contracts will be exchanged, then we can put in an application on a rental property. At the moment we're checking Rightmove daily, and have a shortlist with possible properties on it, and we've even viewed three of those, two of which remain on the "possibles" list.
We're taken on more space in a local self storage place, and have started moving stuff that won't be needed in the next few months into that space. I emptied our loft space last Sunday, for example, and we'll keep doing that kind of decluttering until we have a certain moving date.
We're off on holiday next Monday, with a night in a hotel at Gatwick before an early flight to Palma de Mallorca, to catch our cruise ship. The itinerary is Tangier, Gibraltar, Malaga, Cartagena, and Valencia. Grandma is coming too, for her second family holday after 10 days in France with Cath, Nick, Elizabeth and William.  The conveyancer and estate agent know that I can take calls and check emails on the ship, so hopefully we'll have some positive news either during the trip or as soon as we get back.
While we were up at my mum's house, we went to see Guns 'n' Roses at the MEN Arena, my treat to Olga for doing a wonderful job with Danil. G'n'R didn't do their 30-something-with-kids demographic any favours, only coming on stage at 11.07pm, when I'd assumed we'd have been back at mum's by midnight! Olga and I decided to leave at 1.10am so we could let mum go to bed, and Axl Rose was still singing, with a couple more hits still to come, so although they were late onto stage, they certainly gave value for money. And Olga looked great!

It's the cricket season of course, and whilst I've only played three games so far, I have been to Lords, thanks to my uni friend Ed, an MCC member. It was the first day of the first test against the West Indies, and we were in the Warner Stand, next to the Pavillion. There was even a view of the cricket from the Gents!

Lara's update

Lara has been busy too over the last month, mainly with the Queen's Diamond Jubilee. She learnt the National Anthem so she could sing it at the nursery's party:

She enjoyed performing it, she gave a lovely rendition at a family party when we went up to see Grandma at the end of May, and I caught her practising whilst on her throne:


Luda arrived from Russia on the Sunday of Jubilee weekend, and Olga wasted no time in taking her, Lara and Danil to London to join in the celebrations on the Tuesday:

It's great to have Luda here, helping out with Danny and Lara, and the dogs, and around the house generally, and Lara is loving having her Baba here, and it's clear how Lara has grown up in the 8 months since Luda left, she's much more willing to attempt a little Russian when we prompt her, so I really hope after 6 months Lara's Russian will have improved a lot.
She's also developed a new catchphrase: "I don't like that!........ I LOVE it".
We went up to see Grandma for a few days at the end of May, to help celebrate Grandma's birthday, and so we could view a couple of potential rental properties in the north west. One of these viewings was some hours drive north of mum's house, and we took Danny, but Grandma's birthday present was to have to look after Lara for the day, but the weather was brilliant, and they went to the park and had ice creams and had generally wonderful time.
I took the dogs for a walk that evening, with Lara, in the farmer's fields behind my mum's house. The grass hadn't been cut for some time, and was very long, so much so that I kept losing sight of Jackson. I took a video of the boys enjoying themselves, but caught Lara in the background... she disappeared too! Keep your eye on her once I bring the camera back up after looking at Mishka:


She twisted her ankle a little, but was a brave little trooper and barely cried!
Finally, she's had a growth spurt, and has put on 4cm in height in 3 months, she's now 109cm, and from the looks of him, it won't be long before Danny catches her up!