We're still here!! 6 months in....

Yes, we are still alive and well over here. Life is very busy, between work and shuttling Lara to and from skiing, skating and swimming lessons, it doesn't leave a lot of time or energy left to keep this blog up to date.
However, the 7th February marks our 6 month anniversary since we moved to Canada, and it seemed right to check in.
We're up late tonight watching the Winter Olympics, it's snowboard slopestyle at the moment. Lara has been watching the coverage in the mornings while getting ready for school, and it'll be interesting to see if she wants to take on a few jumps on Sunday at her final day of ski lessons. Here she is in the lilac suit:

Hopefully I'll start posting again on here soon to get ourselves up to date, but suffice it to say for now that everything is going really well, the kids are thriving, Dan is running about everywhere, and has started talking a little, enough to get his message across. He's very polite, we hear his version of "thank you", "please" and "sorry" quite a lot!

Happy 6th Birthday, Lara

Lara turned 6 today, and has been excited about it for weeks. She was happy for me to wake her up extra early this morning, at 6am, so she could open her presents before she went to school.

Dan helped too before we took him to nursery, and Olga was able to watch via skype, and join in with the singing of Happy Birthday.

Once we'd taken Dan, and had a quick skype chat with Grandma, Lara set off to school armed with enough muffins for the rest of her class.

At 1pm and 7pm she sang in her Grade 1 Christmas Concert, where the children sang traditional Christmas carols in both English and French (try and work this one out..."On vous souhaite un joyeux noel..").  The school streamed the concert live on the internet, which is a great idea. Grandma watched the 1pm show and Olga watched the 7pm show. When I went to see the 7pm show, with Dan, the school Principal said that they had had 130 hits for the 1pm show, including from the UK. When they review the hits for the evening show, they'll have probably their first Kazakh hit.

Dan was amazingly well behaved throughout the 25 minute show. I was prepared with all sorts of food to distract him - it usually works - but he just sat still on my knee the whole time, watching the show, and loved joining in the applause at the end of each song.

Lara played with all her new toys after we got home, had her third lot of birthday cake, and then did as she was asked when I suggested she take herself up to her room and get herself ready for bed.  I wasn't really expecting her to, and when I went up 10 minutes later, I was very pleasantly surprised to find her in bed with the light off. She wasn't asleep, and had neglected to brush her teeth, and after that much cake I insisted she get up to do it, which she did without complaining. 

She might just be growing into a nice young lady!

Lara - the woman of the house

Olga has had to fly off to Kazakhstan tonight for 2 weeks work, so Lara has been left as the sole female in the house! She is steadfastly refusing to do any cooking (or cleaning, come to think of it), telling me that "You're the chef, Papa".
I'll get my own back tomorrow morning when I have to wake her up extra early as she'll have to come with me to take Dan to nursery at 6.30... but she is having a pyjama day at school tomorrow, so at least I don't have to pick out her clothes.

We live under the flight path into and out of Calgary airport here in Airdrie, which meant we got to wave goodbye to Mama as her plane flew overhead this evening. It was the same when Grandma flew home in September, except this time I was ready with the camera, and Dan can say "Bye Bye Mama" now. I've also took a screenshot of the flight track, just to prove this was Olga's plane! You'd think I'd have more to do with my time, but the kids are tucked up in bed now. I'll try to catch up on this blog over the next two weeks. Famous last words...

(I know it's hard to see, but that small flashing light in the sky is a BA Boeing 767)

Here's the flight track:

A Long Weekend Away

The 11th November is a public holiday here, and Lara's school is also closed the Friday before, so we've decided to take this opportunity to have a long weekend away. We've come to Canmore, and are staying in the same hotel where we stayed when we visited between Christmas and New Year last year.
It was a bit daunting to see how we'd all get on sleeping in one room, it's different now Dan is that much older. He sleeps very well at home, going down with no fights at all around 7pm, and usually we have to wake him up at 6.20am to take him to nursery. Tonight he was funny, standing up in his travel cot and pretending to ignore us, but this only lasted for 10 minutes before he gave up, and started snoring (truely his Grandpa's grandson). At the moment - 8.30pm - Lara is putting up a fight, though to be fair she has developed a cough today. Typical really, the first day of a holiday and she's ill for the first time in months.
Lara and I have managed a little bit of skiing on our new skis this afternoon, but only on the nursery slope at Nakiska, where we've bought season lift passes. They're only partially open at this time of year, and we arrived too late to benefit from the lifts that were open, so we'll give them a try tomorrow. The main thing is Lara took off down the nursery slope like she's skied every day of her life, which is very encouraging. Dan was limited to playing in the snow and offering food to anyone who wandered past.
Once we'd checked into our hotel in Canmore, we headed to the pool, and its waterslide. This is a major attraction for Lara, I'm not sure if she's more keen to come here for the waterslide or for the skiing and sledging.
We enticed Dan into the pool as well, and he took to it like a duck to water. He's not been in a pool since he was very young, but he really enjoyed it, giving huge applause whenever Lara shot off the end of the waterslide.
There wasn't really anything to photograph at Nakiska today, there'll be plenty over the next day or two, but here are some photos & videos from the hotel pool, oh, and one cute one from earlier in the week when the kids were being sweet.

Lara finally fell asleep at 9.15pm while this video was uploading to youtube, after some medecine and once we turned the lights off, so Olga and I are sitting here, drinking beer in the dark. The things we do for our kids!

No snow.. Yet

So we woke to no snow, but it has been raining, just to serve me right. The temperature is dropping towards zero though, so we might still see some white stuff.