December

 December passed in a bit of a blur. The sea freight had been shipped, but the air freight was still to go. The girls visited and I needed to finish up with my work.

To make matters more complicated, we were one person down. In England, Kris had stepped into a pothole and jarred her knee. She had on and off pain but was able to work around it, until the 24th Nov, when she tried to walk up the stairs and her leg gave way. She wasn't able to put any weight on the leg and was in a massive amount of pain.  We managed to get her to the floor by the couch, but ended up needing an ambulance to get her to hospital to find out what had happened. At the hospital we were informed that they wouldn't have an MRI available to do a scan for a few days and so they sent her for an X-Ray. When we returned back to her room in the emergency department we noticed that her paperwork was still on the shelf, but didn't think much of it. She had been brought in at 2pm and it was now around 5pm. I waited with her until about 11pm, and we still hadn't seen a doctor for results. At this point she was starting to get hungry and hadn't had any painkillers since about 4pm and was pretty sore. We called a nurse and found that, because her papers had been left on the shelf in the room, they didn't have any record that she was even there and had forgotten about her. At about 1am we finally saw a doctor who said that the X-Ray didn't show anything (as we expected) so they had no idea what was going on.  I ended up heading home around 2am so Kris could sleep. The next morning they decided to admit her because she still wasn't able to put any weight on her leg and, because of the previous shoulder surgery, she couldn't use crutches. The nurses then informed us that they wouldn't be able to schedule an MRI for over a week and Kris wasn't able to head home until she could walk with aides. She ended up in hospital for most of the week until they managed to find a walker that she could use to move around a little. 

Meanwhile, Cameron, Tom and I relocated the sofa bed downstairs and cleared up so she would be able to return home. On Thursday she was able to get home and was dropped off by hospital transport. The MRI was scheduled for Monday.

On Friday we had an appointment to see how Tomas had recovered from his pancreatitis and luckily we got the all-clear. I dialed Kristine in on a video call.

By Monday, she still wasn't able to walk more than a few shuffling steps, so we organized a taxi to take her to the hospital for the scan. It took a few days for the answers and eventually we got good news - she had torn her meniscus and while it was very painful, it would heal on its own and didn't need surgery. Over the next few weeks she improved dramatically until she was able to walk again (albeit with a limp and a bit of pain) by the time Alana arrived.

With Kristine out of action, life still continued. We still had work, cleaning/packing and planning for Alana's arrival. We weren't sure if we'd be able to do our end of visit trip, or if she would even be able to fly - but luckily we got the all-clear for both.

As for the packing:

The air freight was scheduled to go on the 23rd of December, but we were then informed that would mean that it would likely sit in a warehouse until the first week in January until it could ship. Instead, if we sent it a week early, we would be able to get it shipped and sent before Christmas and it would be ready for us when we got back into our house.

So on the 16th we managed to get the air freight packed and sent:

We then had just our suitcases left to go. We were scheduled to leave the apartment on the 27th and start our final trip through Norway before we headed back to Australia, so we needed to get our suitcases packed. Unfortunately we ended up with way more than we expected and it wasn't looking promising to get it all in. We dropped a few full suitcases off at a friend's house to get them out of the way while we left only clothes, bed sheets, doonas and the PlayStation. But we were around 40kg over our luggage limit. 5kg extra luggage was going to cost around 900 danish crowns (around $225), so that didn't seem like a good idea. We decided to take a chance with PostNord, who managed to ship a 20kg bag for us for 2200sek, or around $300.

For Christmas Eve, we celebrated with Pete and played boardgames. Christmas day was spent packing and Boxing Day with spent with some friends from rugby. It was hectic but great to catch up with everyone.

We finally got the bags packed, house cleaned and we were out on the morning of the 27th.

We'd had to return the company car on the 20th, so we had hired a Passat for the last week and the Norway trip. It was a struggle packing all of the remaining suitcases into the smaller car, but at last we could say goodbye to the house and start on our way up to Norway.