Snowy Days

We got a decent snowfall overnight and the kids played outside most of the day. Using the snow they shoveled from the walkway as well as almost all the snow from the yard, they have constructed their own little living room in the back yard. Two chairs, two "beds", a table, some shelving. Also, my favorite, is that they constructed a giant Mancala board out of snow and they are using gravel from the side of the house as the stones.

The next day was our fist trip to Banff. We foolishly trusted the weather report and did not dress warmly enough for the hike we had planned, so instead we took a much shorter route. The kids have been complaining that they don't like hiking ... apparently, when "hiking" becomes "walk for a bit and play in the snow a lot" they are huge fans!

A blog post I can no longer find recommended the Park Distillery for eats and boy was that a good call! Between the beef and the buffalo burgers, the ah-may-zing Hikers Salad, and the really delicious house tea (I was too cold for a cocktail, although they looked tasty) it was a perfect, hearty way to refuel after all the playing (I mean hiking).

Sentences you never think you'll utter

Last weekend edition:

Was the gorilla always wearing that purple tutu?

If the onion was going to bite anyone, it would have been me.

... Where everybody knows your name

One thing we've been wanting but missing most places we have lived in the last 10-15 years is a "go to" - a restaurant that is casual enough, tasty enough, and close enough to home to be the place we go regularly and where the waitstaff know who we are.

We found it.

The only consistently good food we have found so far is BBQ, which is something you can find on practically every corner. The place around our corner is very, very good. We went last week when my mom was in town, and as usual for the Madnicks (slightly less so with the Poczaks) gave our server a memorable evening. Which means when she handed us our menus tonight she noted the absence of one of our party.

She is very, very good. We are thrilled to have found our "go to" place so early in the tour. Now I just need to convince Terry that we are not really going to go every week. It's BBQ. Our hearts probably can't handle that.

New School Year

I should start with the day Terry went to register the children in school (one week before school started, and the day after we had a signed lease). Being supporters of public school when our children can actually learn, i.e., they speak the local language, we had decided not to send them to private school in Calgary.

I get a text from Terry around 20 minutes after the appointment time. Canada uses a March cutoff date and that puts Alex in 7th grade, not 6th. Zoltan will be in 5th grade. My first instinct is "hell no, we're going to fight this." My second instinct is "with a March cutoff, they are not the youngest - they are in fact in the very middle of the pack. And they have pretty much always been bored. Let's see how this goes."

The one concerning feature is that with the moving up, rather than both children attending the same elementary school that is a 5 minute walk from our house, now Alex goes to a junior high that is about 1.5 miles away and there is no yellow bus service - she has to take a regular city bus. She has my (lack of) sense of direction. Did I mention this is one week before classes start?

So we move cell phones around so each kid now has one. We had an emergency talk/text plan for each phone and at the last minute we decided Alex would need data to be able to track the bus routes or get walking directions. I am so grateful we made that decision and horrified about what we would have done had we not done that (more on that later).

The elementary school actually combines grades, so 5th and 6th are in class together although they apparently separate for math and some special classes. Zoltan is settling in, managing very well with being the last one out of the house in the morning and the first one back in the afternoon.

Because Alex registered for school so late, she was not able to get her top choice special classes but she did get art and band. She's also settling in. things are very different - seventh graders can leave the school grounds at lunch if they want, they switch classrooms for every class, and as mentioned before she takes the city bus to and from school. On her first day of school I rode the bus with her to school, she rode home alone and there were no issues. On the second day she missed her stop, rode apparently several stops too far and had to find her way back to school. Has she not had data on her phone she would not have been able to get walking directions to school and would probably still be wandering lost around Calgary. So, yay for smartphones.

Note, she is now a pro at finding her way on the bus system and for figuring out how to fix it if she does make a mistake (wrong bus, miss a stop, etc). We couldn't be prouder.

Our First Canadian Rockies Hike

With the weather and everyone's health in line, we rushed out the door last weekend to check out a reportedly easy hike a bit over an hour away.

Our kids have seen far too many amazing things in their short lives and are subsequently painfully jaded. For Alex I could blame it on tween-ness but Zoltan has no excuse. They did not care about the spectacular mountains. Or beautiful view. Or the waterfall. Or the fresh, crisp air. Speaking of which, it is August and it took nearly half the hike for me to shed my jacket and my long sleeved T-shirt. Needless to say Terry is in absolute hog heaven.

In all fairness, they did did eventually stop whining about wanting to go home.

The guide book calls Canmore "Alberta's Aspen" but about a million times smaller.We headed into town after the hike to grab lunch and to wander around. The kids did an amazing job not whining in the candy store, and were happy to use their allowance to get some treats to snack on during the ride home.

Bullet train sushi

Not too far from our apartment is a Japanese restaurant that delivers the dishes via bullet train, in a very modified version of conveyor-belt sushi places in Japan. Point Sushi also has a number of cooked dishes to ensure the kids ate something too.

The way it works: Each table has a tablet with the menu for ordering. Order in groups of four - the trains have spots for four dishes - but order as much as you like. When the order is ready, a little "bullet train" (looks more like a lengthy car) zips down the runway along the booths and stops at your table. Remove the dishes and the car zips back to the kitchen.

It's tapas-like, with very small plates. We ate about 16-20 dishes for everyone to have enough food. To be completely honest, the cooked food was quite a bit better than the sushi. And the novelty ... we'll try to get back once more while we're still within walking distance.