Better upgrade to steaks!

mom in the back ground behind Brian at left.







Andrew- my brother and the girls made a team.
I was trying to make a post for Father's day. I had just taken the most awesome pictures of dad reading to the girls, but I took them on his camera. So, once we had figured out uploading my pictures, I went to upload his, only it started to upload 1600+ pictures. So I told it to cancel and then, unknown to me it deleted the pictures I had taken, pictures and video of the hot air balloon dad filmed getting set up at the park tonight where we were for a picnic a class mom had coordinated, plus pictures from a graduation they had been to this week! So I tried to do something nice and did something really, really bad.

Us kids were going to pick up something to grill tomorrow and I thought burgers would be fast and easy, but I better upgrade to steaks! This so totally sucks!

SORRY DAD!!! It's not the first time I screwed up in our long career as father and daughter and won't be the last, so I'm glad we will rise above this, we will right? A way to a man's heart is through his stomach perhaps... ;)

And to Brian, super dad, who has so much on his plate right now and still gives the kids baths! You are awesome and since I'm not in the dog house with you, you get a burger, just kidding! You deserve a huge steak and your favorite beer, which is found only in the US, I think. OK, we'll see what we can find ;)

Happy Father's day!!!

Introductions

Everyone heard that we are moving here where my cousins live, but you may not know them. Just like we were unknown to Fort Qu'Appelle, but fairly widely known as "the cousins". We were visiting the community outreach and an excited voice exclaimed "so YOU'RE the cousins!". Sheena is seen here with the head honchilla of the Outreach, Keitha, who according to one relative is estimated to be related to about %50 percent of the town. Sheena wrote an article about Fort Qu'Appelle and ended it by mentioning the fact that it is such a wonderful town that a Texan family of 5 has been in the works for a year to move there. That's small town, right there, when 5 people moving to town makes headlines. All of that to say, they really had heard we were coming!

Mike, her husband, is apparently missing from my photos, thus far. Probably in part due to the fact that he was often running off to soccer games or practices. He coaches his daughter Moira's team. Here she is with her garden plot. She has an older sister Victoria and younger sister Arwen. Arwen has been the youngest for a long time and was absolutely thrilled to have 2 tag alongs for the week we were there. She kept asking us not to leave and apparently is in mourning that we are not still there. (We are currently in Stoon where Brian is working at Jenn and John's). We are getting time with mom, dad and even got to see Andrew the other night (my brother).

To make things more confusing, Sheena has a brother (my other cousin) who also lives in town. Ian and his wife Janet have 2 kids, Kellen and Lannelle ages 3 and 2. Janet is the super fit athlete who is going to help whip me into shape by inspiring me to drag my kids all over town on foot. Sheena also has a sister (my other, other cousin), who often comes from Regina to join us for a family get together and her parents aren't that far either, so sometimes Uncle Bill and Aunt Mary get into the mix.

Here's Brian at his first gig in Fort Qu'Appelle. He has 1 or 2 more scheduled this summer.

Go for a walk

Janet showed me where the Trans Canada trail is in Fort Qu'appelle. It is a gorgeous path through nature preserved areas. I loved it! Also, there is a bridge from town that goes over a dam and along a path to a nearby beach, where the kids played while I went to see a house again.
The funny part is that after a long walk, over this unpaved terrain, pulling my three kids in a wagon, I now had to get myself to the house viewing in 10 min. Janet (my cousin's very athletic wife), lent me her super nice jogging stroller and offered to keep the older kids while I took Emora. Since it was a ways out of the park, I was pretty sure I would be cutting the time way too close, so I tried to jog as much as I could.
I am not a jogger. Not by any stretch of the imagination, but the stoller did inspire one to jog and I was getting later by the minute, so I was jogging, all untrained, unexercised and already somewhat spent from our morning jaunt.
We thought the house was only a block or two from the bridge. It wasn't. It was more like 10 blocks away, thus more frantic jogging. I finally spotted the street and still had a block to go down to the house. I saw our realtor and my husband standing by their vehicles talking. The realtor had spotted me too and asked Brian if his wife jogged. "Oh no!" he exclaimed, "she swims". Then up I jog, with the fancy pro jogging stroller, swimming in my sweat, all out of breath and apologetic.
This is a comedic tragedy, because even after my outrageous efforts, we made an offer, the seller countered, and then we made another offer, but he did not accept. So while my body still screams at me for pushing it so hard that day, we left Fort Qu'Appelle, with no house promise in sight.

Brian's going to work on Jenn's house, so we came back so that he can at least do that while we figure out another plan, or the seller changes his mind, or another house comes up for sale, or we hear an audible voice tell us to go x,y and z and offer a,b,c for a place of our own.

Meanwhile, the kids are champs, loving time with grandpa and grandma again. We will see Imogen tomorrow and Saba is back to being a carefree acreage dog, where she can barely terrorize anyone!

Loving nature

It has been so cool to be closer to nature here. The other day I took the kids for a walk along a road that overlooks one of the lakes and a fox ran out in front of us into the bushes. Tonight while we ate supper, we saw a big bunny through the window, hoping up the lane. We've seen pelicans and today the kids found a nest that had fallen from the tree. There is a robin nest easily viewed at the back of the house with four of the brightest blue eggs a person has ever seen. Saba was delighted to discover there are squirrels here for her to chase and bark at. The kids also saw a mouse today. They tried to trap it by drawing a picture of cheese in the dirt. Apparently auntie Sheena had declined their request for real cheese with which to draw out the critter.

Today was our first day that the rain let up. It is very unusual for it to rain this much, but I believe it's rained some everyday we've been here. It held off nearly all day today though, so Brian, the kids and I did some yard work at the Koops. It felt so great to get out in the absolutely gorgeous yard and get some exercise too, as well as get everything beautiful again. We mostly cleaned up wet leaves from the property.

We are looking at one or two more houses Sunday, but unless they are amazing, we think we know the house we will put an offer on. It needs some work, but looks like it could be a good fit for us in the long run and a neighbor told us they are asking way too much and that we could get it for a much better price, so we are hoping that is the case.

We have all been dealing with a cold and the girls with eye infection stuff, so that has not been ideal and I still haven't gotten anything resolved with Ivan's teeth, so there is still a lot to do, but things are moving along. I realized that I need to take pictures of what it looks like here!

But then the rain does not inspire one to take pictures. We have been creative with taking the kids to the school gym to play (my cousin teaches there so she got us in) and the kids did their first home skit for us today, with the help of Arwen. They were super cute!

Ivan's 1st day of kindergarten

Giddy mom after Ivan gets home from his first day of kindergarten: So how was school?
Fine.
What did you do?
I don't remember.
Did you do math, or reading, writing?
I don't remember.
Did you make friends?
Yes.
What are their names?
I don't know.
What was your favorite part?
Everything.

My spy (Arwen's mom, Sheena, also doubles as a school teacher) provided some more details. According to her, the teacher and principal said he did very good and that he was super smart. He did an activity about the day and month we are today. She also said that a kid wanted to sit with him on the way home on the bus, but that Ivan was getting on with Arwen and that several of the kids all started calling his name for him to sit with them.

With a ton more prodding, I was able to determine many details from his gym class time. He went on and on about the scooters they got to play on, but still had selective dimentia regarding the classroom activities, unless it involved food. He told me precisely what food he did or didn't eat and that he forgot to give them his loonie for milk.

Later that evening, after we watch Moira play soccer, Victoria (beautiful, red headed, dancer, grade 9 cousin to Ivan- who we hadn't seen all day) sits next to Ivan in the van on the way home and says: How was school Ivan? He says: Great! We did the day and month with these cards.
Did you make any friends?
Sort of.
What do you mean?
Some of them said mean things.
Well I bet tomorrow they will be your friends.

I did manage to finagle earlier in the day about Ivan thinking kids had said mean things, but I'm not overly concerned about it since I've learned from experience that he has a very wide conception of what mean things said to him entails and he was neither distraught by it nor could he remember what they had actually said.

I did find it immensely fascinating to note however that it took me hours to get only the vaguest of details and nothing academic, whereas the tall, young cousin gets heartfelt confession, open conversation in a nanosecond. What is it that makes moms the automatic non-confidant?

So I figure to save some effort and simply have Victoria ask him each day how his day was while I hang out eavesdropping!

Ivan's only complaint is that he only has one more day to go to school since I had only asked for him to go a couple of days. Tomorrow we are going to look at houses, and if we get much accomplished, we will probably head back to Stoon Sunday evening.

Kindergarten!!!

So much of my worries with this move has been on how Ivan will do with all the transitions. He doesn't typically do well with change and likes routines. Or course right now our life is the absence of routine. They never know where we will be sleeping, our stuff is in boxes and bags all over the place and everything is new. So I built up a little army of friends to pray that everything goes smoothly and for Ivan especially to transition well.
One of my cousins had the idea that Ivan could visit the kindergarten class here a couple of days while we were here. So today he and I went to the school to meet the vice principal and kindergarten teacher and discuss his attending this week. Ivan's only complaint was that I didn't leave him there!

Now we are finding that Brian and I are the nervous ones. I mean he isn't just going to school. It's all day, instead of a half day like in other cities here. He is going to take the bus, because he insisted that he wants to go on the bus in the morning with his cousins. We had to get him a second pair of running shoes today because they have inside and outside shoes, it is so wet outside, he can't wear sandals and they are having gym tomorrow. They are also going to a nursing home to play bingo with residents. He is so pumped. I made his lunch and two snacks today for him all the while wondering "how did this suddenly happen??" We are so amazed that he is loving it so far. Thanks for the prayers and keep them coming that he will have a great first and last day of kindergarten (Thurs). Maybe after his day Thurs. I can get him to tell you all about his adventures at school.

Back in the Fort

I realized the other day that I hadn't taken any pictures with my family in it. I was trying so much to get pictures with Joey and Angie before they left because I knew it was our last chance with them. Everyone asks me what it's like to move back, but it still feels to us like we are just visiting and moving around a lot. Which we are. We just got our health cards applied for and they will arrive shortly, so we only have about 3 things left to do business wise apart from getting a house. We are actually going to try to look at places this week.




Emora and mom cooking.

Walking along the river bank of the Saskatchewan river.

lots of cousins!

8 days ago we set off from Abilene, Texas for Fort Qu'appelle, SK, Canada. We found out the day before we left that Brian's Ford F150 extended cab truck would not fit on the flatbed we had entended to rent, so good for us that the Vann's were already coming. Joey drove Brian's truck, Brian drove the U-haul and I drove the van, with Angie as my dvd manager, snack dispenser and keeper of sanity. The dog rode in the back of the van too, but she was so easy, we forgot she was there for the most part.
Upon arrival, there was a welcome party of sorts. My cousin invited her extended family and we had burgers and stories until so late at night, some of us fell asleep in chairs and had to drag themselves off to bed.

Angie asked Ivan how many cousins he had played with this week. I said that it depended how you count cousins. Some that I call aunts are actually cousins, so if we count them all, we tabulated 15. And that's with us missing the wedding that took place in Stoon the day after we arrived in the country. If we had been there for that, it would not only have been tons of fun to see everyone, but we wouldn't have been able to count cousins.
We arrived in Stoon Wed. and in the next few days Joey and Angie got to experience the wild fluctuations of Saskatchewan weather. At first it was rainy and cool. Another day it was warm and overcast, but we got to walk along the river bank. Saturday, it rained, hailed, got very hot, then rainy and cold all of a sudden again. We did manage to get out and walk the trails at Beaver Creek during a perfect moment in that mix. The kids got every minute of reading, ping pong playing and hillarity that they could squeeze out of the Vanns. But they had to leave this morning to return to Abilene.

This picture was taken in the plant area of the Mendel Art gallery, where we got some wedding pictures taken when we were married 12 years ago! Tomorrow we are heading back to Fort Qu'appelle hoping to find a home. Pray up a storm of good tidings on us, as the bank doesn't seem to like the fact that we don't have permanent jobs yet. You would think great credit, no debt and some money in the bank would mean something!! So we could use a little divine intervention here. We also have a few more tactical things to take care of and hope to send Ivan to school for a couple of days of kindergarten this week. Then we will be back in Stoon where Brian is going to start working on John and Jenn's house that they are retrofitting.

We've arrived!

It was 3 long hard days, but we made it. Actually, day 1 was the worst because we had all worked so hard to get ready to leave and then did a super long driving day arriving around 8 in McCook, NB to finally eat supper. Day 2 we were smarter. Instead of stopping for a picnic or a sit down supper, we made our sandwhiches on the road and did drive through eating in the car, that way, when we arrived in Minot, ND the second day, we had already eaten and could enjoy the pool! We swam and were better rested for day 3, when we went through immigration. Brian is now an official permanent resident. Everything went so smoothly and we got to Fort Qu'appelle about 4pm SK time (5pm Texas time). The guys got the truck unloaded and we enjoyed an evening with no less than 12 of my extended family showing up from 3 cities for our grand welcome, first night hamburger welcome. The kids are cranky, but loving all the family. Mostly they are cranky because they are overtired and not wanting to sleep or take breaks. So far today, we have enjoyed taking it easy, sleeping in and not doing anything much. But we do need to get out and try to get some stuff done today. We will be heading to Saskatoon Wed. to see more family. Thank you to everyone for your prayers. I know they made a huge difference. Everything went so smoothly.

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