Tout le monde a son prix

Literally, "Everyone has his price." Or hers, in this case

I've written before, I think, about Mermaid Girl's...er...lack of enthusiasm for the move. And despite the Canadianicity Practice in evidence as of the last post, she's still been liable to fall into weeping and lamentation whenever we dwell too much on the subject. Sometimes she'll chide us for even bringing it up: "Who started talking about moving? You should have known that would make me sad!" The best we can hope for is tepid approval of any Vancouver-related idea.

Until last night.

Renaissance Woman was the one who broke the news that we'd signed her up for two summer camps North of the border. This was not out of the blue; we'd consulted with her, told her about the programs we'd found, and asked her what she'd like to do before registering her. So we were taken aback when she gave us one of her trademark glowers upon hearing that she was signed up for circus camp.

"You should have asked me first," she spat out.

We stammered that we had asked her, and she'd wanted to, but that we supposed we could cancel if she'd changed her mind.

Anyway, RW hastened on, that wasn't the only camp she was going to; there was also Little Girl of the 1920's Camp, where for a week she'd get to dress up and have tea parties and ride the carousel every day.

Whereupon MG leaped upon RW; hugged her repeatedly, cried out that she was "perfect! You're perfect, Mama!" and topped it off by insisting, "Promise me we're moving! PROMISE me!"

Well. All right, then.

Who knew that the way to our girl's heart was through a pile of dressup clothes in a rec center?

Our Canadian Girl

Well. I partly haven't been posting because it's hard to post when I'm sitting on something and don't want to jinx it.

And I still am not completely sure, and am still scared to jinx it. Maybe it will be okay if I write it very very small. So:

It looks like we might be really moving to Vancouver this summer.

Neither of us has a job lined up yet, so there's that pesky little question of running out of money. But we've gotten to where both adults in the house can say with some surety that we *want* to go. My Permanent Residency papers came almost a month ago--months before even the most optimistic predictions about Immigration Canada's response time. (I have a theory that my application was at the bottom of a big pile of applications in an office in Buffalo, and someone knocked over the pile, and when they restacked it mine providentially ended up on top.)

RW's doing a lot of work on the house, and I'm surfing rental and real-estate sites with equal ferocity. We did a scouting trip over Passover, and looked at two schools we liked in neighborhoods we liked that are perhaps not quite so out of our financial reach as some other parts of the region (though one of the schools has no after-school care onsite or nearby, which is potentially a deal-breaker). And I've talked with my supervisor (though not with many other people at work) about the possibility that I may not be returning next year, and have gotten an extension on my contract deadline for 07-08. We've both been applying for jobs and networking where we can, RW more actively than me. In fact, she's at a conference up there at this very moment.

But what's heartening me as much as any of that is that the Mermaid Girl doesn't seem quite as unequivocably opposed to the move as she used to be. On our scouting trip, we went to a community seder held by a synagogue that a friend of ours goes to. MG was introduced to the Rabbi's daughter, a nice kid about her age, and the two of them ran off and were barely seen for the next three hours, when they were found happily climbing on wobbly dangerous objects in a coat closet. That was about when the Rabbi's kid started begging us to send MG to her Jewish day school next year (not really an option, but it was a nice sentiment).

When we got back, we told MG about the schools we'd looked at while she was with her grandparents for the day, and she expressed a preference for one of them over the other rather than falling on the floor and weeping at the prospect of leaving her beloved Smartypants Yuppie School. And she's expressed enthusiasm about having regular piano lessons from her Vancouverite aunt, and skating lessons from Uncle Skaterboy.

She's actually learned, of her own volition, the real lyrics to "O Canada" so that she won't be caught singing "My Bags Have Gone to Ecuador, or possibly Dundee" when her classmates next year are singing "With glowing Hearts we see the rise, the true north strong and free."

And the other day she was waving some ribbons around and wanted to make sure I was admiring them. "Pretty nice ribbons, EH?" she asked pointedly.

"Are you practicing to be Canadian?" I asked back.

She nodded. "Yep. Because when I'm there, if I say, 'nice ribbons, huh?' they'll be all, like, '"HUH?!?'"

That's my girl: easily assimilated.