January 2018

A quick jump to January 2018, just so I could publish this video of Lara:

April 2017

Right then, back to April 2017...

The weather was unpredictable, this is a photo of us having a picnic on 19th April...

But here is the view from the house on the 25th..

Lara's schooling is coming on well, particularly in maths. 47 out of 44:

This is a good picture to show off what the foothills are like at this time of year:

At Easter we were at the trailer for our traditional easter egg hunt, and then some skiing:

And then a walk by the lake that Leo DiCaprio walks across in The Revenant:

I know, I know.. radio silence!

OK, so we are still here! Happy 2018!
I'm going to try and catch up a bit by doing a month-by-month post, bear with me.
Lara is able to find and read this blog now, so I'd better not say anything too bad about her, or post any unflattering photos, or I'll be the first to hear about it.

Late March skiing

Conditions were very nice at Nakiska at the end of March, though as you can see from the first photo, of Lara and Olivia, you could find some bare patches. The girls had taken me to an out-of-bounds area that their coaches had taken them to earlier in the day, and we skiied down the run that had been the first part of the Women's Downhill course in the '88 Olympics.

They had race training on a closed piste, and Brady Leman, the Canadian World Cup Ski-Cross competitor, was there to lend a hand (it helps that his girlfriend was one of Lara's coaches)..

It must have been a good day, it's rare that Lara AND Dan both fall asleep on the way home..

OK, let's catch up. Briefly.

Right, one post in 4 months and 2 weeks, or 134 days, just isn't good enough.
This is supposed to keep non-Facebook friends and family up to date, as well as giving the kids an interesting read once they're a bit older. So, let me bring you up to speed with what's happened since 7th November.
Baba Luda arrived! We had a bit of a wait at the airport, for the best part of two hours, but that was down to the CBSA immigration people taking their time to interview the people in front of Luda in the queue. Once she got to the front of the queue, all the paperwork was sorted out quickly and here she is, for two years at least.
Grandma arrived, stayed for five weeks, and went home again. It was great to be able to show her how we cope with winter, and for her to experience -20C (briefly), stay for a night in our trailer in the mountains, and see all those stars that are visible when you're away from the city. She saw the kids in their skating lessons, and met some of Lara's new skiing buddies. We missed out on skating on the Bow River on Christmas Eve as Lara had a trip to urgent care in Airdrie, after I squashed her wrist while doing our two-man bobsleigh impression on the local sledging hill. No great harm done, fortunately.

Lara turned 9, having a party with a bunch of her school friends at a local crossfit centre, which has an inflatable obstacle course the kids could play on.
On the subject of birthdays, I'll skip forward to March, and Dan's 5th birthday. For the first time we decided to give him a party that he could invite friends to, and they went to a new play centre in Airdrie.

On the Winter sports front, both Dan and Lara are transitioning from Airdrie Skating Club to a different club, 30 minutes drive away in Calgary. So whilst that will be more inconvenient for us, they should both progress more quickly in their new club, and that's what parents are for, isn't it?
Dan has started in the Minimeisters program in the same ski racing club that Lara is in, and he's doing really well. He has a two-hour lesson each Saturday morning with a handful of other 4 and 5 year old boys, and already they have skied down one double-black diamond run:

Lara has competed in one race, at Sunshine, but she missed the Nakiska-based Reitbauer Cup race this years, as it coincided with our week in Mexico in late February. Both kids will take part in the NASA fun race on April 1st, then Lara will compete in a race at Lake Louise on April 2nd.  Her midweek training sessions at Calgary Olympic Park have been and gone now, but she enjoyed them and hopefully benefitted from them. It's a strange place to have a ski hill, very close to the city, and I can't say I found skiing under lights very easy.

Finally, we had a week in Mexico, in the same hotel that we stayed in last year. This week wasn't all-inclusive, unlike last year, but we stopped at Walmart on the way to the hotel from the airport and stocked up, and we had a room with a great view over the bay, and the hotel's entertainment area, so we were able to watch the evening's cabaret without paying extra!
We all went whale watching this year, and it paid off, with a mother and baby humpback jumping about close to our boat for 20 minutes.

Oh, and Olga and I incorporated a new business - Rover RV Inc. - at the start of February, which hopefully means we'll start renting out our motorhome and trailer over the summer. Watch this space...

St Patrick's Day

The kids dressed appropriately for St Patrick's Day :-)

Mexico - Cabo San Lucas holiday

Halloween Candy & Dentists

As is the way in North America, Halloween was a big deal for the kids, and for some of the grown ups! We went to a friend's house for a party on the Saturday evening, the adults dressed up as well as the kids..

Then on Halloween itself we did the obligatory trick-or-treating, but it only lasts a couple of hours and then there are all the sweets to eat, we have to help the kids, it wouldn't be fair on them to make them eat it all.

Coincidentally, both kids have had two fillings each this last week! Poor Lara had hers on the 31st October, which did limit how much candy she could eat that night! Dan had his two a week later, but they were very small, and didn't require a numbing injection. He had been promised that he could choose a new dinosaur if he was good for the dentist, and he was, so meet Rocky the (Inflatable) Rockysaurus:

Grandma Invasion & Crazy Weather

Only one week now until Baba Luda arrives from Russia for an extended stay, up to 2 years. The language situation in the house could get a little complex, as I should speak to Lara - and Dan - in more French really, and there will be no escaping Russian for the foreseeable future. I need to start practicing too!

Then in a month, Grandma arrives from England, fresh from her own house move from Radcliffe to Portishead. It'll be great to have them both here for a month over Christmas and New Year - let's hope for a genuine White Christmas!

Thinking of White Christmas, and snow, we've had the polar opposite recently, no pun intended. For the last week or so, and predicted for the next 5 or 6 days at least, we've been subject to a Chinook, meaning the daytime temperatures have been very high for the time of year - here's a photo of our thermometer I took last Friday afternoon - it peaked at 20 degrees C:

This doesn't bode well for the start of the skiing season - we're supposed to be at Nakiska this coming weekend for Lara's first training session in the U10+ group, complete with her ski racing suit. I think there's enough snow high up on the mountain for her to train, but I don't think the rest of us will make the effort to join in. The weekend after Lara has training at a different resort, near Banff, and that's a lot higher, and has a lot more snow already, so we'll definitely be skiing then.  I've had to turn part of our attached garage into the family Ski Tuning area, where I'll be sharpening edges and waxing bases during the week, especially for both Lara's pairs of skis:

School Photo - Grade 4

Lara's latest school photos have come home, and she looks great on them again. The photographer takes three or four shots of the kids in different poses, then photoshops them onto different backgrounds. Here's just one that I particularly liked:

Lara chose her own dress and hairstyle, and seemed to take some extra attitude with her on that day.

Watch this space - not to be outdone, Dan had his photo taken at his preschool recently, and we've seen the results online. There are some crackers there, I'll post them once the prints arrive here.

Back on Stage

Oops, it's been a month, and time has flown by, and this isn't even our busiest time yet - that's about to come, once the skiing starts.
Lara has been attending drama classes one night a week in a local school, and tonight her group put on their performance. As usual, she knew her own lines, and most of the lines of the rest of the cast. Like most of the other actors, she was a little quiet, but certainly not the quietest there, and we hope these classes will give her confidence with public speaking as she grows up.

She's just left of centre in the photo, she was playing the teacher on a school field trip to a museum, so another good role.

Skating and Skiing are back on the agenda (updated)

Skiing

Lara has started her "dryland" training for skiing already, this involves a session on Friday evenings in a gymnastics arena, doing jumps and flips and all sorts of body conditioning, then on Saturday mornings she has an outdoor session for an hour and a half, with more running, jumping, stretching and all those sorts of things that come naturally to an eight-year-old. As much as the physical side of things, these sessions are also to help the kids bond as a group, to get to know the other kids in her new age group.  She started in the Under-8s (or U8) group two winters ago, and this gave her 18 days on snow. Then last winter she was in the U10 group, and this meant 33 days on snow. She has now progressed into the U10+ group, and this starts to get more serious. She's due to have 56 days on snow during the autumn and winter, starting on November 12th. That's almost every Saturday and Sunday until the end of April, and also a bunch of Wednesday evenings at Calgary Olympic Park during the colder months from December to March.

As far as Lara's concerned, so far the highlights have been catching up with her old skiing BFF, Lillian, and getting a racing suit. She didn't need one for U10, and really she doesn't need one for U10+, but that's the age when the kids start getting them, and once one kid has one, it's hard to stand up to the barrage of begging that ensues. So, she tried one full price suit on in a shop a couple of weeks ago, but that was more for us to get an idea of her size, and then last weekend Olga found her a perfect, used suit at the ski club's used-gear sale, and Lara is delighted with it. At $75 rather than $350, so are Olga & I.

At U10+ the kids also have to have a team jacket, again to build this team-spirit thing, and I must admit they do look good when you see a bunch of them, all in the same black coats, bombing down the hill in perfect control. They have reminded me, on more than one occasion, of mini-bad-guys from a James Bond movie.

So here's Lara in all her gear, complete with her M.A.S.T jacket (a Bond-esque acronym), which stands for Mount Allan Ski Team - the mountain where the Nakiska resort is located.

Tomorrow night we are off to a specialist skiing shop in Calgary for a "Club Buy Night" - coaches from the ski club will be there, along with representatives from the big ski and boot manufacturers, and the idea is to make sure we get Lara the right skis and boots to suit her ability for the coming season. Lara's U10 coach will be there, which is going to be very useful, as he knows most about her technique and which skis and boots will be the right choice for her for this coming season. The credit card will need to go in the freezer to cool down once we get home, I suspect. But at the same time, it will be a very interesting evening, whilst she's not yet having skis or boots custom fitted, this is the next best thing, and she'll be weighed and measured, and prodded and probed before the decision is made. Those will be her "racing skis", we won't trade in her old pair, as we've done until now, as she'll also need a pair of "rock skis" for when the coaches take them in to the trees or down ridiculously silly, narrow, rocky, double-black-diamond runs. I'll meet her at the bottom of those, thank you very much.

It's not just Lara that's getting new toys - given that Dan will also be starting in the racing club, at their most junior level, from January, and all four of us will be skiing a lot, it's time I learnt how to look after the skis, so I'll be doing the "tuning" of all four sets (five, if I tune Lara's rock skis too), so that's the waxing of the base, and the sharpening of the edges.  Lara's ski club put some classes on that I attended, so I've an idea of how to get started, and I've bought some of the necessary gear, and I need to clear a space in our garage. It's a very Dad thing to do, I hear..

Dan is also looking forward to skiing, it'll be nice to ski with him just for fun initially, but then to hand him over to proper lessons on Saturday mornings from January. One of Olga or I will be with him to get him on and off the chair lifts and pick him up if/when he falls, but from what I saw last winter, I think he'll make really good progress. We picked up some used boots from the club sale last weekend, and are on the look out for new skis for him, he's outgrown his last pair. We'll be selling the reins we bought for him, he doesn't need those any more.

Skating

And then there's the skating... Lara is back to skating four days a week - Monday afternoons, Wednesday and Thursday mornings (before school - the alarm goes off around 5.40am!) and then on Friday afternoon. Monday, Wednesday and Thursday is more "general" training, but Friday's is her "competitive training" with a smaller group, geared at getting them ready for the competitions they'll enter through the season. This is also the session where the head coach puts the girls into a harness to help them learn their jumps. Olga got some of Lara's attempts on video - this was one of her better ones, but there were others that were better than this that weren't recorded:

Dan also started back at skating today. Now that he's no longer in full-time nursery, we've been able to put him into skating lessons at lunchtime, when it's much quieter, and he'll get some more individual coaching. He was the best kid out on the ice today! They group the kids into coloured groups based on ability, with the complete beginners in yellow group, then it's purple. then green. Dan is in green, and has been for a while now. Today the only other kids on the ice were yellow, so Dan was often sent off to do a quick lap of the rink while the other kids practised standing up after falling over. He helped tidy up the teaching aids at the end of the session, he was the complete teacher's pet! We had to buy him some new skates just before the lesson, which need sharpening, but it's a bit like riding a bike - you don't forget. He was a little wobbly for the first minute or so, then was fine, though he still pushes with only one leg, rather than using both equally. He's very, very left-footed, like his dad and grandpa! (and very left-handed, which is new for both sides of the family)

UPDATE - Olga tells me Grandpa Nikolai was actually left handed, but was forced to learn to write right-handed at school!

Autumn / Fall is here

Autumn, or Fall, has arrived, and the leaves are turning a lovely colour, right before they fall off, anyway. We even had fog, which is a rare thing here.

Dan has realised that he loves playing in the leaves, having not been very impressed with the idea a couple of days ago.

Lara's school had its annual Terry Fox run last week, to raise money for charity. Lara put in a couple of laps of her school field..

Happy Birthday, Olga

And Happy Birthday too to Olga on the 22nd. Always has been a stubborn, playful, gentle, loyal and intelligent part of our family... Hang on, no, sorry, that was Mishka. Olga is all that and much more - beautiful, funny, determined, protective, and doesn't need two walks a day or she'll poop in the garden.
Her kids are pretty cute too..
We went to our usual family-friendly restaurant, Ricky's, for Olga's birthday meal.

Happy 10th Birthday, Mishka

Sarianova Lucky Fella turned 10 in human years on the 20th September, or 70 in dog years. Always has been a stubborn, playful, gentle, loyal and intelligent part of our family. Long may he continue thinking he's a teenager!  And just to think we almost didn't get him - he and his sister arrived as a complete surprise 24 hours after their other brother and sisters!

Canmore & Banff Camping Weekend

This weekend the weather forecast looked good, and as it might have been the last weekend of warm weather for some time, we took the opportunity to take Harvee the RV out to Canmore and Banff on Saturday and Sunday.
The weather wasn't quite as warm as we hoped, but Harvee stayed nice and warm and it was great to be able to set up quickly on Saturday afternoon and leave quickly on Sunday morning. Lara and I had a one-hour trail ride booked in Banff, a round-trip through forest and along the banks of the Bow River, and we took the opportunity to drive up to the Mount Norquay ski area to see how Harvee liked the hairpin bends (no problems) and to take some scenic photographs of the RV overlooking Banff.