Not nearly an armful

Had the medicals and x-rays today. All very straightforward and relatively painless - apart from the bit where they took a blood sample. My son was very intrigued about the blood test.

"What did she just do?"
"Took some blood from my arm."
"Is she going to put it back?"

Oh, and the parental wedding date has been fixed for a different weekend in June. Hurrah!

Blood pressure rising

Came home yesterday to find my better half looking pale and clammy, convinced that he'd lost the family's passports. We need them for our medicals on Tuesday. Last time we had them was after our research trip to Canada earlier in the year. So it was a case of trying to remember which bags we brought through passport control.

He found them ten minutes after I'd got home, but that's the sort of stress we don't need...

Talking of unwanted stress, my father has recently announced that he is going to be getting married next year. That's fine, good for him, but there are already problems because I couldn't make the date his fiancée had set her heart on. I was planning to be at a conference in Canada on the weekend in question (and have already submitted a proposal) - typically it is the only weekend in the whole of 2007 when I had something pencilled into my diary. They hadn't actually booked the church when I dropped this bombshell, but I haven't heard since whether they have changed the plans or not. Sigh.

Hope we'll both be more chilled when our blood pressure is taken on Tuesday!

Tick tock, tick tock

The official clock has started ticking - a letter arrived from the Canadian High Commission today, asking us to organise medicals to prove that we aren't going to be a drain on Canadian society. Child #1 has her arm in a sling at the moment, with a suspected fracture of her elbow - perhaps not the best advertisement for a hospital-free family...

Complications

Bad news on the family front. Father-in-law has just been diagnosed with inoperable pancreatic cancer. Life expectancy seems generally to be less than a year. Horrible all round, and as far as emigrating goes this makes things particularly complicated. Mother-in-law is lovely and she would want to be near us if she was left on her own (we've discussed this already). She doesn't know about our emigration plans, although I think she has her suspicions. Now we have to decide whether we plough ahead, or shelve things for a while. Trouble is, in some ways the emigration process is a bit of an unstoppable train once you're on board, and at certain points you run out of options.

Ho hum.

First post

Just starting on an emigration journey from the UK to Canada. We spent a few weeks exploring the country in May and June, and I came to realise that going to live in a new country would be like trying to prepare a meal in someone else's kitchen. Hence the name of this blog.

It's very early days yet, but we're getting towards the top of the emigration queue (we sent our application off in July 2004), so it feels like it will be sooner rather than later...