Montreal Day 3

We are figuring out this city and starting to settle in a bit. We've been to the neighborhood/city where our new house is, Cote-St-Luc (CSL), and have signed Micah up for swimming lessons, swim team, and nursery camp! We also bought a CSL Fun Card which gives us access to many of the park and rec facilities for free! We don't move into our new house until July 9th, but it's nice to be able to get to know some people before then. Micah's swim lessons and swim team start on Saturday so hopefully we'll start to make some friends! It would be nice to have someone to invite over on Micah's 4th birthday (July 17th).

We have also decided on a preschool for Micah: Curzon Preschool in Montreal Ouest. It's a small co-op school that's mostly in English, but there is one French teacher who speaks to the kids mostly in French. One perk that I'm excited about is that they do ice skating in the winter for gym!

Let's see, what else have we done? We have signed our mortgage and gotten all of our back accounts up and running. Tomorrow we will go to apply for the Quebec provincial health insurance. Also, with help from the free grocery shopping service at the hotel, we have a kitchen stocked enough for lunch and dinner (the hotel provides breakfast everyday) so we don't have to eat out all the time. What a relief!

Honestly, with two little kids (one being just a wee two-month-old!) I don't get to do what I want...ever. But, you might be wondering, what am I looking forward to doing when the time is right? I am looking forward to visiting Atwater Market, which is right down the street from our hotel. Also, I am looking forward to going to Ikea with Junia (when Micah is at camp) to scope out the furniture we will need: new bedroom furniture for Micah and a couch for the living room. The current owners are leaving the master bedroom furniture. So nice!

We are surviving in temporary housing quite well, all things considered. We are living in a small one bedroom place until July 9th. I have managed to organize our things well enough, and to rearrange the furniture to make it seem bigger than it looked when we first walked in. Even so, I am counting down the days. We are about to open a bottle of wine to celebrate getting halfway through the first week. It might seem silly to do this, but honestly, it's the little things that help get us through. :-)

Montreal Day 1

We have survived our first full day in Montreal! We cleared the contents of our truck through customs where we found out that upright baby walkers are illegal in Canada. But since they had to confiscate that AND we had two little kids, they gave us a break and cleared our car without inspecting it. So, we also retrieved our car from the moving company warehouse and returned our rental car to the airport. (Oh! You may be wondering how we got to our hotel from the airport since we completely filled both of my parents care going to the airport in Madison. We called Zelko Zilik, another prof in Brett's dept at McGill, and he met us in a minivan and drove most of our luggage to our hotel so that we could rent a smaller car. So kind!) We also went to the underground city again and bought Micah a little Air Canada plane. We also got a Bell Canada cell phone plan and new smart phone! Woo! I'm so excited to learn how to use my new smart phone! We made it back to the hotel by 7:45pm to put the kids to bed. Tomorrow (hopefully) won't be as busy.

In addition to all of this, we had two major successes. 1) Brett successfully navigated us from the airport to our hotel without a GPS and without accidentally sending us back to the airport to start over (which happened yesterday). 2) I successfully navigated us to the toy store without completely overshooting it and having to backtrack a whole city block (which happened the last time we went there). Yay!