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.