"I'm hot!" reports Dan

Dan has been off nursery this week with a high temperature, from a cold given to him by Lara. He woke us up at 4am on Tuesday morning, crying, and when I went into his room, he told me - quite clearly - "I'm hot! I'm hot!". This seems to be a big step in his development, being able to get this message across. So far we've been able to translate his speech into meaningful English; he's very polite, his "please", "thank you" and "sorry, Lara" are understandable, if not perfect. That last one is very sweet, usually after causing Lara to burst into tears, and is often followed by a hug that soon turns into a wrestling match.
He's not been eating quite as much as usual, but his variety is still good. Even today, when under the weather, he's still polished off cheerios, toast, pasta bolognese, an apple, a banana, more cheerios, cheese, bread, cucumber, a fruit smoothie and ice cream. He's got his Grandpa's sweet tooth and loves cake and ice cream. We understand when he's asking for Ice cream, it sounds like "eye dream" and he stands next to the freezer door.
Other than when he's ill, his sleeping is good. It takes longer to get him off to sleep now, we can't just get him ready for bed, give him warm milk, deposit him in bed and leave now (we had that luxury for months) as he likes us to stay with him till he drops off, sometimes that's 10 minutes, other times it's an hour. Once he's asleep though, that's it. He very, very rarely wakes in the night, and normally we have to wake him at 6.15am to get him up for nursery. It seems a little cruel, but one of us has to be online for work by 7.30am, and the other is getting Lara ready for school, so Dan has to go to nursery early. He gets breakfast there, and he seems to enjoy it, it's rare to have a hissy fit with tears and him holding on to us. If we leave him to his own devices he'll wake between 7 and 7.30. We try to keep him up a little later on Friday nights, past 8pm, in the hope that he'll have a lie-in on Saturday morning - the only morning at the moment when we're not getting up early. Lara puts a DVD on in her room and sometimes we get to lie in until 8.30 or even 9am.
Here he is tonight, on his way to bed; we found Mickey the Monkey earlier this week, he's survived the move. He's survived many moves actually, since being made by my Nana well over 30 years ago!
I've been typing this on my phone in his room while he drops off. I was expecting a long stay, as he'd had a long afternoon nap today, but he fell asleep within 10 minutes of me putting him down, so I'll creep out now.
Maybe I'll try to make this my usual blogging time, rather than playing Deer Hunter or Stick Cricket on my phone like I normally do!

Updating the kids' measurements

We thought it was time we recorded the kids' weight and height, as we haven't done that for ages.

Lara is 23.5kg and 1.22m (4 feet exactly!)
Dan is 13.7kg and 87cm.

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: